From Guest-Blogger Cameron Atwood: A Government’s Violence Against Its People Is Not “In Control”

Here’s an item from the file “It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.”

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton told the UN Security Council, “The evidence is clear that (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad’s forces are initiating nearly all the attacks that kill civilians, but as more citizens take up arms to resist the regime’s brutality, violence is increasingly likely to spiral out of control.”

Isn’t it obvious that, in any situation where a nation’s military is killing its own people that the situation has already spiraled out of control? Is there a sense in which a government’s violence against its own people is “in control?”