Should We Intervene In Syria

We should have learned from Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea and so on. But we haven't.  We must let the Syrians settle their own issues. There is no threat to us at this time unlike North Korea with its nuke capabilities.  We must focus on the real issues not the ones which make no difference. Syria at this point makes no difference to the US.

The US has this attitude that we can control everything in the world. We can't. We must stop this dumb thinking.  

Conservative Tom

Paving The Road To Ruin With Islamists

May 1, 2013 by John Myers 

UPI

Syria was among the topics President Barack Obama addressed in a press conference Tuesday.

“We will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people.” Those are the words from President Barack Obama. He also warned that if the regime in Syria is using chemical weapons, it will have “crossed a red line” creating a “game changer” for his Administration. Sorry, but this is no game changer.

A decade before the opening of his new Presidential library, President George W. Bush invaded and then occupied Iraq. It was the neoconservatives’ dream to turn the Mideast into a 16^th century Venice, a renaissance for an entire region. The seeds of Western democracy were expected to flower and spread. Instead, we have been left with an Arab Spring that looks more like the great American Dust Bowl.

Yet American politicians keep pushing for greater intervention in the Mideast.

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), a man who never met a war he didn’t like (amazing given his experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam), is again blowing on the cavalry bugles. Last week, the aging warrior said he believes the Obama Administration is being overly cautious in analyzing intelligence about the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria.

McCain said it was clear in his view that the Syrian regime had crossed the red line and that this required immediate military intervention from the United States.

“In my view it was crossed,” McCain said. “Not only have our intelligence people concluded that, but as importantly, the Israelis, the British and the French have as well. Obviously we know Bashar al-Assad will do whatever is necessary to stay in power, [including] massacres of his own people.”

McCain has support from other Republicans, which may make the next war the only thing the President and Republicans can agree upon.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told CNN: “If [the Syrian civil] war doesn’t end soon, the king of Jordan is going to be a casualty.”

The reasoning goes in Washington that America must stop Islamic religious and tribal factions from killing each other? Yet three thoughts come to mind:

1. Does America not have bigger national security problems, namely North Korea and its long-range missiles, which may already carry nuclear warheads?
2. If Muslims are killing each other, the Muslim extremists may be too busy to kill us.
3. How in the world can military intervention in the Mideast do anything other than make things worse?

The Lost Lessons Of History

It’s amazing to watch America go down the road to ruin just like every great power before it. Rome, Spain, France under Napoleon Bonaparte and Britain during Queen Victoria’s reign all made the same irreversible mistakes caused by imperial overstretch.

It is clear to me that Obama and Congress should read Paul Kennedy’s 1987 classic, The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers. Then, they might understand that with military intervention the cost to America in blood, money and stature will lead to inevitable ruin.

The greatest short-term danger is the immeasurable cost resulting from Mideast intervention, which is driving Islamic hatred against the West and was on bloody display in Boston. Osama bin Laden has long been sleeping with the fishes, but the hatred he preached is growing in every nook and cranny around the globe. Washington is determined to be an occupation force in the Mideast, and you can bet Syria is next. That didn’t work out so well for Rome 2,000 years ago, and we can expect the same devastating results — just much more quickly. Technology has compressed time and space. What took 200 years to collapse an ancient power may happen now in 200 days. Thanks, Facebook!

There is no arguing that there are positions of influence to be had and fat profits to be made — for politicians, commodity and stock speculators, and, of course, America’s bread-and-butter businesses in the defense and national security industries. This is but one reason for Washington to prosecute a relentless decade-long war against Islam, a war which can never be won. (There is also a more sinister reason why our government is so reckless in creating Islam as an enemy, which I will get to.)

During the first Gulf War against Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s forces had been driven out of Kuwait and within Iraq’s own borders. Then-President George H.W. Bush considered the absolute conquest of Iraq as well as the consequences of an American occupation.  Colin Powell, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bush: “You break it, you own it.”

Bush became convinced that Iraq was too expensive of a proposition. Yet his son, George W. Bush, did not take such caution. He launched an invasion against one evil Mideast dictator at the cost of 5,000 dead and $1 trillion spent. The dividend so envisioned by the younger Bush’s advisers — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney — never materialized. Yet it certainly added to their vision of an emerging New World Order, and it added to their own personal wealth. 

In 2006, Thom Hartmann of Common Dreams wrote: “… War was good for business, and good for the political power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Wolfowitz to Cheney who have all become rich in part because of the arms industry.”

After more than a decade, Islamic extremists bent on jihad might borrow the line from the hit 1990 movie “Home Alone” when young Kevin asks the burglars: “You guys give up, or are you thirsty for more?”

Sadly, and as we will soon find out, the answer is that indeed Washington is thirsty for more. And that brings about a very interesting question: why?

I won’t even speculate on the religious tribalism that thrives in the Mideast or why those nations refuse to adapt to Western democracy. I am clueless as to what drives martyrs to kill Westerners and their own. I understand that I will never fathom the mind of a religious zealot. Perhaps it is that they have been impoverished for so long or perhaps it is their chance to gain world fame. Maybe it is the promise of 72 virgins. It is a conundrum that Western minds will never solve.

Orwell’s Omen

What is more unsettling is why our government is invoking greater retaliation from Islam in a war against us that most of our elected officials know we cannot win.

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question all along. Perhaps the goal of our government is not to stabilize the Mideast but to destabilize the United States. Sound crazy? George Orwell didn’t think so. From his book 1984:

On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.  But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties.

Orwell’s 1984 reads like a mandate for our elected leaders: an infinite period of upheaval with “comparatively few causalities” (at least when measured against the millions of people slaughtered by warfare through the first half of the 20^th century).

It is a disturbing endgame being played out by American officials and one that is not serving the Nation.

Prediction: The United States government will put boots on the ground in Syria and any other Islamic country where the outcome will result in further unrest and greater power in the hands of Washington. That means we will not be safer from Islamic extremists that want to kill us or from our government that wishes to enslave us.

Action to take: Intervention in Syria and our continued military and political involvement in the Mideast is an expenditure America cannot afford. However, it will scare us into paying higher taxes and enable the Federal government to take on even greater debts. The inevitable outcrop will be further weakening in the purchasing power of the dollar. The recent correction in gold and silver prices is pure manipulation. It is imperative you hold these instruments in their physical form and, if possible, buy on the current correction. And guns, whiskey and water are even more essential.

Yours in good times and bad,