No kidding: Read The Onion if you want to understand Syria
| Istanbul, Turkey
There's little to laugh about when it comes to Syria, but when it comes to understanding what's happening there, some of the best analysis comes in the form of a joke.
The Onion, a satirical newspaper, has managed to find ways not to just joke about Syria, but to do it in a way that makes sense of the situation. Their writers have started to hit their stride, consistently nailing it with surprisingly .听
It can be exasperating playing it straight when you write news about a situation that regularly produces absurd scenarios. The Onion鈥檚 format allows its writers to plainly make sense of ridiculous situations that can be difficult to explain or fully appreciate in a normal news article.
During many of the trips I made into Syria, I met conservative people who supported the insurgents who used to fight Americans in Iraq, yet these same people were now calling for the same US soldiers they wanted to kill six or seven years ago in Iraq to come to their aid with an intervention in Syria.
Meanwhile, as of at least March, the CIA has been compiling a list of inside opposition-controlled Syria,聽according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Onion managed to explain this dark, complicated reality in just one fake headline: 鈥�.鈥�
Perhaps nowhere have I seen such a clear explanation of the difficulty Obama faces in finding the right response to Syria than in an written as though Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were the author. It concisely and coherently broke down the challenges facing the White House in such a way that anyone could understand why it鈥檚 apparently been so difficult for Obama to make a decision.
As The Onion explained in another article, it鈥檚 also the reason this likely could have happened: 鈥�.鈥�
The Onion has often distinguished itself for providing the right mix of smarts and humor to capture the zeitgeist of a historic moment. Their first issue published in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks is warmly remembered by many as one of the first light moments that helped people begin moving forward after the attacks.
For all these reasons, when you look at the Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of most journalists covering Syria, you鈥檙e likely to find numerous Onion articles posted alongside in-depth, serious reporting. 聽
And really, when the public debate hangs so heavily on comparing a potential Syria intervention to the Iraq war, sometimes it takes an Onion headline like this one to remind us that regardless of where you stand on the debate, you can only get so far comparing two different conflicts: .
