No on Syria

I see a lot of debate on this Syria thing, and only post here because I have a need to collect all my thoughts on it in one place.

Those thoughts come down to this: No. Don't do it.

Why?

A lot of folks say we should, citing the many people killed by the Syrian poison gas, the many others killed in the Civil War, the depravity of the Syrian president, and on and on.

Guess what? They're all right. All that stuff is horrible, disgusting, tragic, an abomination, someone should DO something.

Why should we be the ones to do something?

Mostly, because we can, apparently. The US has this massive military, this huge amount of power, this amazingly high standard of always doing the RIGHT THING because we are good and wonderful and everything the world ought to be and should want to be. Not doing something sends a message that bad people can do anything they want, so what they'll do next, of course, is nuke Israel or San Francisco, it's going to happen any second if we don't do something now.

OK, I just moved into cynical snark territory.

My response to those who say the US should do something about the human tragedy in Syria is to ask "what about Congo?"

Congo, the former Belgian Congo, has been broiled by civil war ever since Belgium left the country, it elected a president, the CIA overthrew that president and put a tame dictator in place, and civil war set in, pretty much ever since. More than 5 million --MILLION -- have died since 1998, thousands per month.

And the United States, beacon of light, guardian of peace and love, has done precisely nothing. Ah what the heck, they're black and don't have oil.

Yes oil. Sorry to sound cynical again, but the war in Syria is all about oil, the middle east, oil, Israel, oil, Saudi Arabia's hatred of Iran, and oil.

You didn't really think it was about the suffering Syrians, did you?

Disruptions of Syria could easily spread, as they already are, and since Syria is in the Middle East everything that happens there affects the price of oil. Since Middle East oil mostly goes to Europe and China (The US gets most of its oil from itself, Canada and Mexico) you could easily say "who cares?" but oil is a world commodity, its price is set globally, if the price of Saudi oil goes up, the price of the oil they pump in Wyoming and refine in Salt Lake City goes up.

So the Syrian civil war could hit home in Utah.

So, do something, right?

No. Listen.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor history and international relations, is a Vietnam Vet, father of a son killed in Iraq, and strong critic of the US considerable international effort to spread American values. He's written a lot of books explaining how the US has way exceeded its reach in maintaining a world-wide economic empire. Simply put, we're spending way more than we're getting back, and our efforts are being more and more futile as we discover that ideology is not something you can defeat on the battlefield, rendering our massive military pretty much useless.

You can bomb them back into the stoneage, but amid those stones they'll still hate you and come back to haunt you.

Bacevich summed the current situation up nicely on the Bill Moyers show:

 “If you think back to 1980,” Bacevich tells Donahue, “and just sort of tick off the number of military enterprises that we have been engaged in that part of the world, large and small, you know, Beirut, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia — and on and on, and ask yourself, ‘What have we got done? What have we achieved? Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more Democratic? Are we enhancing America’s standing in the eyes of the people of the Islamic world?’ ‘The answers are, ‘No, no, and no.’ So why, Mr. President, do you think that initiating yet another war in this protracted enterprise is going to produce a different outcome?”

Which is pretty much where I'm at too -- all those arguments about the tragedy of Syria are correct -- it is a tragedy, but the real question is, what can we do about it THAT WILL ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING USEFUL?

Nothing. 

Both sides of the Syrian civil war dislike us. Even the "good" rebels, the ones supposedly not linked with Al Quida, will take our aid, and say nice things about us, but we have no idea how well they'll run Syria if they win, or whether -- as is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan -- they'll go back to hating us because we're allied with Israel because hating Israel, never forget, is the one thing absolutely everyone in the middle east agrees on, including our good allies in peace, Saudi Arabia. 

Remember, it was Saudi Arabians, spending Saudi Arabian money (earned by selling us oil) and preaching Saudi Arabian religious doctrine (Wahabism is very radical,  not all that far from the preachings of the Taliban) who hijacked those planes on 9-11.

So for all those reasons, and more, we need to sit this one out. Israel is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. We've sold billions of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, so it can take care of itself too. So can almost every other nation in the Middle East, which are all armed to the teeth with arms they've bought from us or Russia with oil money they make from us. 

And, as Mr. Bacevich so nicely says, our record of "fixing" stuff in the Middle East sucks, mostly because the Middle East needs to fix its own problems and hates anyone -- Russia, France, England, us -- who tries to do it for them.

Why? Mostly because they -- we -- are the ones who caused those problems in the first place.