Democrats on the Road to Damascus

In the course of my adult life, especially in the State Department, I became aware of an interesting phenomenon when it comes to foreign affairs. Democrats prefer and advocate for U.S. intervention, including messy, bloody, military intervention, in places where there is little or, preferably, no US national interest at stake, e.g., Vietnam, Libya, ex-Yugoslavia. Find a place where there are US interests at risk--e.g., Panama, Central America, Iran, Cuba--they go into pacifist-anti-imperialist-defender-of-the-peoples-of-the-Third-World mode. Also curiously, as we saw most spectacularly in Vietnam, once the US does go in, they quickly begin to doubt the wisdom of the move, and even turn against the US intervention. They know that once we do intervene, even if it was in a place of no or limited importance before, the act of intervening creates US national interests, e.g., the need to show that the US cannot be defeated, that we mean what we say, etc. Once such interests are created, the liberals, "summer soldiers" if there ever were, become very critical of the intervention, and actively work to sabotage the US effort.

We are on the verge of another of those moments.

I have written before that our policy in the Middle East under the Obama misadministration makes no sense (for example, here, here, here, here, and here, to name just a few posts). Our intervention in Libya was counterproductive to our national interests in Libya and the region; our support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is an outrage on the scale of Carter's Shah of Iran disaster; and our pressuring Israel to deal with and make concessions to the phony Palestinians is criminal.

From all the press it seems that this misadministration is gearing up for some ill-thought-out, half-baked, direct intervention in Syria on behalf of "rebels" who are nothing more than Al Qaeda affiliates. I wrote before that Obama seeks,

to repeat his disastrous Libya adventure in even more dangerous and complex Syria. Remember the Benghazi massacre? Wait until you see the jihadi loons who will take over Syria! Now, you might reasonably ask, what about Assad? As was his father, he is a pencil-necked murdering swine. We all agree on that. As did his father, he runs a repressive, minority-ruled, Iranian-backed regime. Whom are we arming to replace him? Even more murderous pencil-necked swine, that's who. As we did in Libya, we want to replace a nasty piece of work who, nevertheless, can act rationally and with whom we can deal, with lunatic AQ-allied, apocalyptic jihadi fanatics who want a Muslim caliphate or death and will slaughter indiscriminately in pursuit of either goal. 

If you want a clue on dealing with Arab states, don't look to the State Department or the NSC--especially under Susan "It's YouTube's fault" Rice. Look to the Israelis. For them it is literally a matter of life or death who runs the corrupt Arab regimes in the neighborhood. The Israelis detest the Assad regime and have fought a continuous war with it since 1970. They also detested Arafat, and any number of other Arab dictators. They, however, were and are very cautious about promoting regime change. Despite numerous opportunities, for example, they never killed Arafat; they dropped people all around him, but never him. Who would replace him? Nobody knew, so better stick with the disgusting but inept known devil than risk getting someone or something much worse.

Mark my words, if our policy "succeeds," that is to say, it leads to the downfall of Assad, we soon will enter a world of hurt. Assad will be replaced by extremist jihadi psychopaths who will turn on us in a flash. If we don't "succeed," and we just wound the bear, what's left of our reputation is gone, leaving us with one bloody-minded, revenge seeking pencil-necked dictator--backed by Iran and Russia--gunning for us and our interests. Some choice, eh?

If we go into Syria, one positive thing I would hope for is US liberals and lefty Europeans shutting up about Iraq and our intervention there. You cannot support intervening in Syria and oppose intervening in Iraq. Well, not if you are a logical, thinking person, but then we are talking about American liberals and their loony European lefty allies, so . . . never mind.  Whatever the flaws in our Iraqi policy, we had many more valid reasons to go into Iraq than we do to go into Syria; for liberals, however, that does not matter. Obama wants and, apparently, will have his war.

WLA