http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Ever since the Arab Spring began videos have been making the rounds of massacres in Syria and Bahrain, photos of violent protests in Egypt, excited tweets, bloodied faces, Molotov cocktails and all the rest of the revolutionary chatter.
It is tempting to side with the people battling tanks, even when you don’t know why they are battling them. That was how Americans ended up cheering an alliance between the anti-American leftist Kifaya movement and the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo against the Egyptian government. Or backing an Al-Qaeda linked Islamist group against Gaddafi in Libya.
America was built on revolution and sympathy for the underdog is in our national DNA. But it can also lead us to mistake a difference in force for a difference in moral standing. Just because one man has a Molotov cocktail and the other man has a tank, doesn’t mean that the man with the burning bottle in his hand is any more right than he is.
In a conflict there are two possibilities. Either one side is more moral than the other, or both sides are equally repugnant. Or close enough that it makes no real difference. Looking at the disproportion in force is not a useful guide and provides no relevant answers.