There were so many dead, to this day, we still don't know how many died but it could be as high as 750,000. That's higher than World War Two which had weapons not even in the planning stages during the Civil War. Indeed, we ARE "The Greatest Nation On Earth" if we are discussing numbers of dead racked up during a civil war.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because there is an interesting dynamic going on with the way our government sees the Syrian Civil War. The United States government seems wholly unable to understand the concept and motivation of revenge. This is because the government thinks everyone sees things as they do geopolitically. That is, everyone is motivated by philosophic raw sewage that percolates from the doleful cesspools of government-subsidized "think tanks". And "think tanks" they are since septic tanks are the most astute comparison between the two.