The U.S. has become so locked into the idea that “any sort of intervention” must, by definition, “involve the military” that America has become almost unable to act otherwise—or to imagine any way that anyone could act otherwise. And so we end up with this horrible situation in which we think of the only possibilities being either to do nothing while people are being slaughtered, or else to slaughter people in response to people being slaughtered.

Slacktivist, “On Syria and Finding Ways to Make the World ‘Less Horrible’”