It is hard to imagine.
For almost a year Syria has been the scene of an increasingly intense civil war between Bashir al-Asaad’s regime and an assortment of its opponents — Islamists, foreign mujahideen, democrats, secularists, etc. Thousands on both sides have been killed, though the paragons of pro-interventionist “truth” like the BBC and CNN still report the war as if the opposition has only bare chests to present against the regime’s weapons. The United Nations, once again, has arrived on the scene as the West’s anti-Muslim hit man to help destroy a regime it deemed to be a UN-member in good standing until Asaad began trying to maintain domestic order. All of this has occurred, and yet …
U.S. military forces have not overtly become involved in Syria and U.S. dollar expenditures there so far appear to be minimal, except for Secretary of State Clinton’s spending on the few score so-called democrats and secularists who are mixed in with the millions of Syrians opposing Asaad, and whatever costs were incurred by the embarrassing, half-mad U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford as he scurried around Syria championing Mrs. Clinton’s now consistent policy of spurring Arab youngsters to get out on the street and get shot down by their regime. Senior Democratic Party officials, of course, cannot see their way clear to defend genuine U.S. national interests — like avoiding war with Iran or winning in Afghanistan — but their taste for spilling the blood of innocents is unquenchable.
U.S. avoidance of direct involvement in Syria is a good example of how non-intervention can benefit America. A year on and thousands of dead Syrians buried and not one American has lost a job, had a house foreclosed, or incurred any other problem here at home. Americans have thus far not been hurt by the Syrian problem, largely because Washington has yet to find a way to fully interfere in the process of Syrian self-determination. And in truthful but callous terms, many thousands of additional Syrian casualties would affect U.S. interests at home a whit.
This is not, of course, to say, that many Americans are not upset, angry, and eager to intervene in Syria and spend tax dollars and the lives of other American parents’ soldier-children to dethrone Asaad. One empathizes with their hurt and outraged feelings, and I for one hope they are principled enough to match words with deeds, quit their jobs and country, buy AK-47s, and go and fight alongside the Syrian “democrats” they so admire. To start the ball rolling, I am willing to donate enough money to buy AK-47s for Mrs. Clinton, Ambassador Ford, and Ambassador Susan Rice.
How long will America’s luck hold? Sadly, probably not much longer. Both parties are dedicated to relentless interventionism, and the calls for the U.S. to “do something” in Syria are steadily increasing among politicians and the media. This past weekend, for example, FOX allowed Charles Krauthammer and Senator John McCain to propagandize the network’s viewers in favor of U.S. intervention. Mr. Krauthammer earnestly called for Washington to arm the Syrian opposition as President Reagan armed the Afghan and Angolan insurgents, and Senator McCain demanded that the might of the U.S. military be used to stop “the massacres” in Syria. If this is not done, McCain added, it would mean that the $700 billion spent each year on U.S. defense capabilities would have been wasted.
It seems the Naval Academy did not teach Senator McCain that U.S. military forces are meant to be used to defend genuine U.S. national interests, not to satisfy his heartfelt if imperialistic desire, and that of Mr. Krauthammer and their brother and sister interventionists, to remake the world — especially the Muslim world — in America’s image via military force. These same folks, after all, have forcefully advocated and implemented this policy since the start of the so-called Arab Spring, and have so far helped to install anti-U.S. Islamic regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. In Spring-training terms, they are three for three. Syria would make it four-for-four, and that would augment and accelerate what is an on-going U.S. strategic disaster in the Muslim world.
In addition to the clear damage Washington’s intervention in Syria would do to U.S. national security — by putting another mujahideen-backed Islamic regime in power — such an intervention would again demonstrate the ability of Washington’s tyrannical and/or oil-rich Sunni Arab “friends” to get any U.S. administration spend American blood and money to promote their interests.
The repeated calls of Arab leaders — especially from the Gulf states — for “Western military intervention” in Syria has nothing to do with sympathy for the suffering of the Syrian opposition. They want the U.S. military to do their spending and dying for them to accomplish three goals:
First, to get rid of Asaad and his hated and heretical Alawite sect which has long ruled Syria, and thereby facilitate its replacement by a Sunni Islamist regime. The foreign Islamist fighters now flowing into Syria to fight the Asaad regime surely are being funded from the coffers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, and the UAE.
Second, with Asaad and the Alawites destroyed by the Arabs’ U.S. mercenaries, the Sunni Arab leaders will have quashed one of their strongest fears, that which Jordan’s King Abdullah frequently describes as a “Shia arc running from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon.” Because of the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam that arc is today complete, and the only way to break it is to destroy the pro-Shia Asaad regime and replace it with a militant Sunni government.
Third, with the Sunnis in power in Damascus, militant Islamists backed by the Gulf states will have ensconced themselves on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. At that point, only Jordan’s border with Israel will be controlled by a regime that fears the Israelis. Once the relatively weak Jordanian regime is destroyed — and it will be — by the growing power of the militant Islamists the West has been ignoring as it dreams its Arab-Spring pipe dream, the mujahideen’s close-in encirclement of Israel will be complete.
In the foregoing context, then, the military intervention called for by Krauthammer and McCain — and silently approved and appreciated by Mrs. Clinton, et. al. — will do what interventionism by America’s bipartisan governing elite always does: undermine U.S. national security; strengthen America’s Islamist enemies; deepen the nearing-mortal wound inflicted on our country by the federal debt; and get more of America’s soldier-children killed.
And all this pain and damage from intervening in Syria will be, of course, only a tiny percentage of the disaster that will accrue to America at home and abroad when the interventionists start their pro-Israel war with Iran.
