by
Patrick
J. Buchanan

Recently
by Patrick J. Buchanan: Ann
Romney Asks the Right Question

In pushing
for U.S. military intervention in Syria – arming the insurgents
and using U.S. air power to “create safe zones” for anti-regime
forces “inside Syria’s borders” – The Washington Post invokes “vital
U.S. interests” that are somehow imperiled there.

Exactly what
these vital interests are is left unexplained.

For 40 years,
we have lived with a Damascus regime led by either Bashar Assad
or his father, Hafez Assad. Were our “vital interests” in peril
all four decades?

In 1991, George
H.W. Bush recruited the elder Assad into his Desert Storm coalition
that liberated Kuwait. Damascus sent 4,000 troops. In gratitude,
we hosted a Madrid Conference to advance a land-for-peace deal between
Assad and Israel.

It failed,
but it could have meant a return of the Golan Heights to Assad and
Syria’s return to the eastern bank of the Sea of Galilee.

We could live
with that, but cannot live with Bashar?

Comes the reply:
The reason is the Houla massacre, where more than 100 Syrians were
slaughtered, mostly women and children, the most horrid atrocity
in a 15-month war that has taken 10,000 lives.

We Americans
cannot stand idly by and let this happen.

That massacre
was indeed appalling, and apparently the work of rogue militia aligned
with the regime. But in 1982, Bashar’s father rolled his artillery
up to the gates of Hama and, to crush an insurrection by the Muslim
Brotherhood, fired at will into the city until 20,000 were dead.

What did America
do? Nothing.

In Black September,
1970, Jordan’s King Hussein used artillery on a Palestinian camp,
killing thousands and sending thousands fleeing into Lebanon. During
Lebanon’s civil war from 1975 to 1990, more than 100,000 perished.
In the 1980s, Iraq launched a war on Iran that cost close to a million
dead.

We observed,
content that our enemies were killing one another.

In 1992, Islamists
in Algeria won the first round of voting and were poised to win
the second. Democracy was about to produce a result undesired by
the Western democracies. So Washington and Paris gave Algiers a
green light to prevent the Islamists from coming to power. That
Algerian civil war cost scores of thousands dead.

If Arab and
Muslim peoples believe Americans are hypocrites who cynically consult
their strategic interests before bemoaning Arab and Muslim victims
of terror and war, do they not have a point?

As for the
Post’s idea of using U.S. air power to set up “safe zones” on Syrian
soil, those are acts of war. What do we do if the Syrian army answers
with artillery strikes on those safe zones or overruns one, inflicting
a stinging defeat on the United States?

Would we accept
the humiliation – or escalate? What if Syrian air defenses start
bringing down U.S. planes? What would we do if Syria’s Hezbollah
allies start taking Americans hostage in Lebanon?

Ronald Reagan
sent the Marines into Lebanon in 1983. His intervention in that
civil war resulted in our embassy being blown up and 241 Marines
massacred in the bombing of the Beirut barracks. Reagan regarded
it as the worst mistake of his presidency. Are we going to repeat
it because Bashar has failed to live up to our expectations?

Consider the
forces lining up on each side in what looks like a Syrian civil
war and dress rehearsal for a regional sectarian war.

Against Assad’s
regime are the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida,
the Turks and Saudis and Sunni states of the Persian Gulf.

On Assad’s
side are his 300,000-strong army, the Alawite Shia in Syria, Druze,
Christians and Kurds, all of whom fear a victory of the Brotherhood,
and Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

The question
for our bellicose interventionists is this:

How much treasure
should be expended, how much American blood shed so the Muslim Brotherhood
can depose the Assad dynasty, take power and establish an Islamist
state in Syria?

“Tell me how
this thing ends,” said Gen. David Petraeus at the onset of our misbegotten
Iraq War. If we begin providing weapons to those seeking the overthrow
of Assad, as the Post urges, it will be a fateful step for this
republic.

We will be
morally responsible for the inevitable rise in dead and wounded
from the war we will have fueled. We will have committed our prestige
to Assad’s downfall. As long as he survives, it will be seen as
a U.S. defeat and humiliation.

And
once the U.S. casualties come, the cry of the war party will come
– for victory over Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia! We will be on
our way into another bloody debacle in a region where there is no
vital U.S. interest but perhaps oil, which these folks have to sell
to survive.

Before the
religious and ethnic conflicts of Europe were sorted out, it took
centuries of bloodletting, and our fathers instructed us to stay
out of these quarrels that were none of our business.

Syria in 2012
is even less our business.

June
5, 2012

Patrick
J. Buchanan [send
him mail] is co-founder and editor of The
American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books,
including Where
the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill,
Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide
of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his
website.

Copyright
© 2012 Creators Syndicate

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