Meghan Harmening | Opinion Co-Editor

If you’ve turned on your television, glanced through a newspaper, or listened to the radio in the past two weeks, then you’ve probably heard Syria is doing bad things – to put it simply. On Aug. 21, 2013, the Syrian government unleashed an arsenal of chemical weapons in and around the city of Damascus. In doing so, the Syrian government killed 1,429 people – of which 426 were children. In addition, around 3,600 patients were treated for neurotoxic symptoms on the day of the attack.

Turn back to United States President Barack Obama on Aug. 31, and we hear him call this chemical attack “an assault on human dignity.” I agree with him. It is absolutely horrifying a government would find it a good idea to, quite frankly, poison their own citizens. It just doesn’t make sense. I am absolutely no war expert, but I do not believe that an attack on Syria from the U.S. government would do any good whatsoever.

Why in the world would we take an attack that President Obama considers “an assault on human dignity” and do the same exact thing? It doesn’t matter what we throw, be it any type of weapon of mass destruction, we would be doing the exact same thing as they did to their own people. We wouldn’t be any better than they are because there would no doubt be casualties in the process. How can we say this attack “risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons” when we could potentially kill even more people if the U.S. attacks Syria with a whole separate battery of deadly weapons?

I understand the logic. Really, I do. If we don’t blast off a few hundred missiles in Syria’s direction, they’ll never understand that violence is not the answer, and chemical weaponry is not acceptable. How can we look at the Syria and say their civil conflict is more important than any other civil war, genocide, dictatorial government, or even something as horrific as human trafficking? How can we even begin to decide where our priorities should be? How do we determine which worldly problem we should stick our noses in next? How can we be honest and truthful to ourselves and say that the Syrian conflict is going to affect our national security on a large enough scale to validate going into Syrian, boots on the ground or not.

It’s just not absolutely necessary. Unless we feel our national security is under immediate threat, I see no reason to fire the missiles. Again, I’m not an expert, nor do I have 100 percent of the “facts”; however, for the U.S. government to believe that attacking Syria will have more benefits than consequences, is simply naïve. The fact that we don’t even have all of our allies’ support is reason enough to think about this more thoroughly. In the meantime, why not focus on our ever-present domestic issues such as our rising college debt average? Can I get an Amen?

Graphic by Aaron Burns