Out of Business

Lefty Roger Cohen, writing in the Old Gray Whore, makes the case for armed intervention in Syria. It seems he thinks it's "in our best interest." Here's Jim Geraghty's response in his Morning Jolt email:

Everybody knows we're not going to intervene in Syria, right?

Part of this is because we have Obama as president, part of this is because Americans consumed with our own domestic issues right now -- a consistently floundering economy, immigration -- but mostly it's because of Iraq.

Dear world...do you remember how you greeted the invasion of Iraq?

The invasion of Iraq was treated as the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world, denounced far more frequently and loudly than any act by Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad, the Iranian regime, or North Korea.

Giant protests in lots of American cities. Giant protests in every foreign capital. The 2004 Guinness Book of Records described the anti-war movement around the globe as the largest mass protest movement in history -- eclipsing any popular opposition to any act of the Soviet Union or any other totalitarian regime around the globe, ever. Among the elites in Paris, Berlin, and most corners of London, the Iraq War was the single-most important issue, and denouncing the evil of George W. Bush was the most important goal, not building a stable and peaceful Iraq. You recall Kofi Annan denouncing it, and the United Nations delegates scoffing when Hugo Chavez called our president the devil.

You recall the cries of "Bushitler," the ubiquitous Code Pink interrupting every event in Washington, as if some ninny shouting during a press conference ever spurred sudden reversals in U.S. national security policy. You recall Hollywood's relentless cavalcade of movies demonizing the war and those fighting it: In the Valley of Elah, Stop Loss, Green Zone, Redacted, Grace is Gone, Fahrenheit 9/11.

Hey, my Turkish friends so upset by a bloody civil war across the border and a flood of refugees, remember Valley of the Wolves: Iraq? Remember when that film suggested that Jewish U.S. army doctors in Iraq were harvesting organs from Iraqi civilians to be sold in Israel, and that U.S. soldiers use Iraqi children as human shields? Yeah, remember that? Well, go solve your #*%&^ border problems yourself.

The Davos set is horrified to learn that after spending the better part of a decade screaming at the top of their lungs that an American intervention to topple a bloodthirsty Arab dictator is the absolute worst thing imaginable, suddenly Americans are no longer interested in toppling bloodthirsty Arab dictators.

(Slap, slap) Wake up, anti-war movement! You've got what you wanted! The United States is out of the armed intervention business

Were I a cynical sort (ahem), I'd note that the oil exports of Syria are considerably less than those of Iraq and Kuwait, and their economy is much smaller -- by a couple orders of magnitude, actually. That means that a destabilized Syria is a threat to pretty much nobody. The Israelis thumped the Syrians when they were at the height of their power and a well-supplied satellite of the Soviets, (while simultaneously fighting Egypt, by the way). Today, the IDF would probably just send out a couple of battalions of draftee recruits to deal with any threatened Syrian "invasion." Hell, the refugees from the civil war are a bigger problem for them.

This is a good example of yet another blind spot of the American Left: they are masters of public manipulation and sleight-of-hand tricks in domestic political squabbles, but when it comes to realpolitik and hard-nosed foreign policy they are completely clueless. You fight the wars you have a reason to fight and leave the rest to someone else. If Syria falls completely apart it will be absorbed into the heterogeneous mess known as "the Middle East," or it will simply cease to exist as anything other than yet another terrorist training ground surrounded by sand and camels and little else. There are hundreds of such places in the world; one more or less is irrelevant.

In short, Syria is not our problem because there is no compelling reason for it to be our problem.

As for why in the hell we're still in Afghanistan... Well, that's an excellent question. I wish I knew the answer.