Dear Mr Clinton

Yo, Bill - shut the fuck up already.  You can't get me to vote for Hillary no matter how big you want me to believe her balls are.

I dunno what we're supposed to do about Syria.  I'm not convinced we're "supposed" to do anything at all.  My default position is that we mind our own damned business, until or unless their shit starts to spill out over into our shit.

So there's the determinative question:  Who's shit is where right now, and where is that shit likely to be later on?

Another default position for me is that when it comes to the Middle East, nobody knows more about it (or about how weirdly fucked up it is) than Juan Cole - so it's always a good idea to listen to somebody who actually knows his shit.

Obama seems to be attempting to find a face-saving way of getting a little involved but not too much, by sending light weaponry (which of course is not what the rebels need).

Clinton compared what the US could do in Syria to Ronald Reagan’s effort against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But that covert operation of giving billions of dollars and high-tech weaponry to Afghan jihadis was a huge catastrophe, contributing to the creation and rise of al-Qaeda and setting the background for the emergence of the Taliban. It surely would have been far preferable to let the Soviets try to build a socialist state in Afghanistan, as they tried in Uzbekistan. The whole thing would have fallen apart in 1991 anyway. (There is no truth to the notion that the Afghanistan war bled the Soviet Union or contributed to its collapse. Soviet military spending was flat in the 1980s). The Reagan jihad destabilized both Afghanistan and Pakistan and left us with a long term terrorism problem. We let the Soviets alone in Kazakhstan, and we never worry about today’s Kazakhstan.
You never, ever want to encourage the rise of private militias and flood a country with high- powered weaponry.

My other (and over-arching) default position is that I'm real tired of having to babysit these fuckwads all the time.