SYRIA: GROUNDHOG DAY FOR AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

4/11/13

The Obama Administration, after doing a passingly decent job of keeping us out of yet another war in which we don’t belong, is succumbing to domestic and international pressure by moving toward authorizing our further involvement in the Syrian civil war by providing body armor and night vision goggles for the rebel groups in that troubled “nation.”

Why in the world should we be doing anything to help the “opposition” in Syria?   We know that the core of the opposition, certainly on the ground, is composed of people who are al-Qaeda affiliates or wannabes.   They wish us no good whatsoever.   Maybe even more importantly, toppling of the Assad dynasty, out of a misplaced, unquestioning enthusiasm for what the knee jerkers call “democracy” (perhaps not realizing that what we have in this country is, thank God, not democracy but representative government in the form of a democratic republic.   There is more than semantics involved here.   And there is also the question, given the American tendency to squander our time, and prominent slots in the news, on celebrity gossip and other such cotton candy for the mind, of whether even we here in America are ready for representative government, but I digress.  At least I do so parenthetically.) will not lead to some Valhalla of self-determination but, rather, to chaos.  

Look at Egypt and Libya, where western do-gooders decided that we no longer wanted those very bad men Mubarak and Qadafi.  Egypt is on the verge of, and Libya is thoroughly immersed in, complete chaos, with Colonel Qadafi’s former caches of arms feeding the growing flames to Libya’s south and roving, free lance gangs of armed men having their way with the populace and with, lest we forget, foreign consulates.   Even Tunisia, where the numb-skulled panters for “democracy” first had their way by cheering, and then engineering, the overthrow of Zine Ben Ali, things are spinning out of control, with assassination replacing the ballot as a means of transferring power.   Perhaps a less obvious example (And you heard it here first, folks.), is Myanmar, where the military regime is loosening things up in response to western pressure for “democracy”…and where, suddenly, after years of admittedly uneasy yet peaceful coexistence, the Muslims and Buddhists are fighting pitched battles in the streets and burning each other’s schools and places of worship.   Progress indeed.

No one is arguing that the Assads, Mubarak, Qadafi, Ben Ali, or the Myanmarese (?) generals are/were nice people.  They are/were brutal and repressive.   But now we are seeing why, to some extent, they have/had to be.   They are/were in charge of countries whose borders were drawn to suit Western imperial designs, not to account for the ethnic and religious divergences among their populations.  These countries were designed to fail, albeit perhaps inadvertently, by placing ethnic and religious groups whose most salient trait was their hatred for their neighbors, in the same country.   One can’t keep order in such a boiling, dyspeptic stew of toxins by being a nice guy who adheres to democratic principles and respects the Jeffersonian rights of everyone regardless of literacy, education, etc.   And so these countries were ruled by authoritarians who exercised their despotism in varying degrees according to their predispositions and the conditions over which they had charge.   Nice people?   No.  Necessary people?   Probably.

When these types of leaders are overthrown, the result is not the kind of democracy exercised in the debate clubs of the Ivy League and the discussion desks at CNN; the result is a dystopic hell.   The consequences are horrific for the region, the world, and especially for our ally Israel, which now finds itself, courtesy of the “democratic” impulses of its western friends, on the border of two failed states in which “democracy” translates into hatred of Israel and its very existence.

Yet the European powers charge ahead, seeking the overthrow of the Assad dynasty and pressuring us to join them in creating the conditions for dystopia.   And Mr. Obama goes along with the Europeans and with the members of the War Party in this country, led by Senator John “I’ve Never Seen a War I Didn’t Want Us (Meaning you) to Participate In” McCain and his mini-me from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, who would have us, at a minimum, bombing Syrian airfield and positioning more Patriot missiles in Turkey’s south to enforce a no-fly zone in northern Syria.

At best this is a case of Americans’ and other Westerners’ never learning from their mistakes and their hubris due to their being overly enamored with a concept, democracy, with which they are at best passingly familiar and which they assume requires no preconditions.

At worst, and I used to think that this was too cynical a view, something more sinister is at work here.   Perhaps the bipartisan War Party’s entire aim is to foment chaos throughout the Middle East and beyond.   This would create more opportunities for deploying U.S. troops in pointless conflicts…and rewarding the arms merchants who finance the endless exercises is self-aggrandizement these patheticos call careers.