Stay out of Syria

Best Buddies Lindsey Graham and John McCain keep calling for us to do something in Syria.   They don't actually advise putting troops on the ground, but their rhetoric probably leads a lot of people to think that's what they're saying.

They should just stop it.

Here's some perspective on it from Time magazine's Fareed Zakaria:

"From  2003 to 2012, despite there being as many as 180,000 American and allied troops in Iraq, somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Iraqi civilians died and about 1.5 million fled the country.  Jihadi groups flourished in Iraq, and al-Qaeda had a huge presence there.  The U.S. was about as actively engaged in Iraq as is possible, and yet more terrible things happened there than in Syria."

He goes on to say that his point is not to compare atrocities, but to call attention to the similarity of the situations.   Both countries, as was Lebanon too, were ruled by a religious minority;  and, in both countries, that ruling minority was challenged by the people who were in the religious majority.

In Iraq it was a Sunni minority ruling a Shi'ite majority.   In Syria, Assad and the ruling party are of the Alawite minority, which is a Shi'ite subset that makes up 12% of the population, in a country with a Sunni majority.  Zakaria says that, in such situations, the minority regime fights to the end, because it fears for the life of its people once out of power.   There are historical reasons for this fear.   Persecution and even genocide are common among religious factions throughout history.

Zakaria goes on to suggest that an American presence in Syria might make the Assad regime even more desperate -- with his last resort being widespread use of chemical weapons.

Unfortunately, hawks like Graham and McCain -- and their even more conservative colleagues -- seem to have no conception of such complexities.   Thus our debacle in Iraq, where no thought was given by the Bush administration for what would happen after we went in;  there was no conception of the culture or religious enmity among the people and no appreciation for what our presence would bring.   That's how ignorant and arrogant they were.

Ignorance of history and culture, plus jingoistic fervor for exporting our brand of democracy, determined the decisions on Iraq -- to say nothing of the oil interests of leading players.

Let's don't make the same mistakes again.  It's time for President Obama to talk sense to the American people and not let himself be pressured by the ignorance and politics of the opposition.

Ralph