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Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
I would say it's a cost benefit analysis - where can good be done for the lowest losses. Let's not get into that silly "I can't feasibly donate 100% of my salary to charity so I'll donate none" line of reasoning.
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Of course we can't save everyone. But using cost/benefit actually doesn't really work here. We can go there, save their lives and....then what? Hand it back to the Iraqi military to surrender again next time? Sorry to say but the only way to permanently save the lives is to have a never ending presence there. That will obviously severely skew the cost/benefit, rendering the cost almost incalculable. Frankly if you wanted to approach this as cost/benefit, there are likely much better ways to save a lot of lives around the world.
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This may be true, or there may be better ways of going about it. Suggesting that any intervention, however structured, in an area vaguely continguous to previous interventions will necessarily produce the same results is clearly an oversimplification. I'm not dismissing the possibility that you're right and there's just no military or peacekeeping option there that's worth the cost right now, but I'm not sure that's true and if it is it certainly can't be true forever.
But I didn't claim to have a solution; I just think that in the hypothetical situation where we were confident that we could intervene to some effect, that I'd have a hard time saying, "that's just not our problem"
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The point is no one in thousands of years has found a solution. And every time we seem to try something else, it ends up making the situation even worse. Finding a permanent solution is the only way, and the only way to a permanent solution is either not having Western involvement, or having a permanent presence there, possibly even forever. Good luck selling that to the general public.
The world is a ####ing terrible place. We can't solve every single problem. If we go again, we're essentially telling the Middle East that no matter what, we're going to solve your problems. Isn't it about time they solve their own problems? We lose the lives and money, and get nothing more than a chance to go back and do it again. At some point (like after a cost/benefit analysis...), you just have to accept that it's not worth it.