Recently
by Patrick J. Buchanan: A
Reluctant Warrior Tiptoes to War
On U.S. military
intervention in Syria’s civil war, where “both sides are slaughtering
each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line ‘Allahu akbar’
… I say let Allah sort it out.”
So said Sarah
Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. And, as is
not infrequently the case, she nailed it.
Hours later,
Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, at length, echoed
Palin: “Those who are urging the US to get more deeply involved
in the Syrian conflict now are living in the past.”
Four fundamental
changes make it “no longer realistic, or even desirable, for the
US to dominate” the Middle East as we did from the Suez crisis of
1956 through the Iraq invasion of 2003.
The four changes:
the failures of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Great Recession,
the Arab Spring and emerging U.S. energy independence.
Indeed, with
$2 trillion sunk, 7,000 U.S. troops dead, 40,000 wounded, hundreds
of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead, and millions of refugees,
what do we have to show for this vast human and material waste?
Can a country
with an economy limping along, one that has run four consecutive
deficits in excess of $1 trillion, afford another imperial adventure?
On the Shiite
side of the Syrian civil war are Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Russian
President Vladimir Putin, Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar
Assad. On the Sunni side are the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra,
Sunni jihadists from across the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood,
Hamas, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Is victory
for either side worth yet another U.S. war?
Ought we not
stand back and ask: What vital interest is imperiled here?
And even if
Americans favor one side or the other, how lasting an impact could
any U.S. intervention have? The region is in turmoil.
Since the Tunisian
uprising that dethroned an autocratic ally, dictators have fallen
in Egypt and Libya. There have been a Shiite revolt in Bahrain,
a civil war in Yemen and a civil-sectarian war in Syria that has
cost 90,000 lives. Iraq is disintegrating. Al-Qaida is in Pakistan,
Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb region and Mali.
Now the muezzin’s
call to religious war is heard.
“How could
100 million Shiites defeat 1.7 billion (Sunnis)?” roared powerful
Saudi cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, calling for a Sunni-Shiite war.
Al-Qaradawi denounces Assad’s Alawite sect as “more infidel than
Christians and Jews” and calls Hezbollah “the party of the devil.”
“Everyone who
has the ability and has training to kill … is required to go”
to Syria, said al-Qaradawi.
In Afghanistan,
the Taliban have made a comeback, and the United States is negotiating
with the same crowd we sent an army to oust in 2001. And the press
reports we will be leaving behind $7 billion in U.S. military vehicles
and equipment when we depart.
Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, the most successful Turkish leader since Kemal Ataturk,
appears to have lost his mandate, with hundreds of thousands pouring
into streets and squares both to denounce and to defend him.
The United
States, says Rachman, “has recognised that, ultimately, the people
of the Middle East are going to have to shape their own destinies.
Many of the forces at work in the region — such as Islamism and
Sunni-Shia sectarianism — are alarming to the West but they cannot
be forever channelled or suppressed.”
Did those clamoring
today for intervention in Syria learn nothing from Ronald Reagan’s
intervention in an earlier Arab civil war, the one in Lebanon? Result:
241 dead Marines, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut bombed and hostages
taken.
Reagan left
office believing his decision to put Marines in Lebanon was his
greatest mistake. And to retrieve those hostages, he acceded to
a transfer of weapons to Iran, an action that almost broke his presidency.
Yet it is not
only in the Middle East that we are “living in the past,” in a world
long gone. As Ted Galen Carpenter writes in Chronicles, under NATO
we are committed to go to war with Russia on behalf of 27 nations.
If Russia collides
with Estonia or Latvia over the treatment of their Russian minorities,
we fight Russia. For whose benefit is this commitment?
Today Japan
spends 1 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. Yet the
USA is committed to go to war to defend not only the home islands
but the Senkaku islets and rocks in the East China Sea that China
also claims.
Are the Senkakus
really worth a war with China?
NATO
was established to defend Europe. Yet Europe spends less on its
own defense than we do. Sixty years after the Korean War, we remain
committed to defend South Korea against North Korea. Yet South Korea
has an economy 40 times as large as North Korea’s.
Former Rep.
Ron Paul asks: Why, when U.S. debt is larger than our GDP and we
are running mammoth annual deficits, are we borrowing money abroad
to give away in foreign aid?
Good question.
As for those ethnic, sectarian and civil wars raging across the
Middle East, let Allah sort it out.
June
22, 2013
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
© 2013 Creators Syndicate
The
Best of Patrick J. Buchanan
This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell