Once again, a President threatens to plunge our nation into a foreign civil war. The Gulf of Tonkin “attacks”, Bill Clinton’s “Sudanese nerve gas factory”, Saddam’s “nuclear weapons”, and many other Presidential “misstatements” in US history make it clear why the Founders didn’t give one politician in the Oval Office the power to unilaterally launch wars.
Americans are skeptical of the need for another multi-billion-dollar Mideastern quagmire. Facing polls showing only 9% of the American people believe in his Syrian war, Obama has announced that he will graciously allow Congress a vote on foreign policy.
The proposed Congressional resolution is both more and less than a legal Declaration of War. It does not follow the Constitutional model of a Declaration, being far more vague and announcing no concrete objectives (and no endpoint). However, it is so broad as to allow the President to attack anywhere, as long as he claims it is to “prevent or deter the use or proliferation… of (WMDs)”. Here are the relevant paragraphs:
“(a) Authorization. -- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria in order to --
(1) prevent or deter the use or proliferation (including the transfer to terrorist groups or other state or non-state actors), within, to or from Syria, of any weapons of mass destruction, including chemical or biological weapons or components of or materials used in such weapons; or
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(2) protect the United States and its allies and partners against the threat posed by such weapons.”
These broad powers would be less alarming if we didn’t already know that the Administration has chosen to aid “rebel groups” that include Al-Qaeda elements. We just saw this same movie in Libya, and it doesn’t have a happy ending. Letting jihadists acquire large-scale weaponry and territory for their organizations has spread civil war and terrorism into Mali and other nations in Africa.
Senator Kerry has given us no reasons to believe that Syria won’t turn into another Libya or Iraq. But there is one difference… any radical Islamic terrorists that acquire vehicle-mounted nerve gas rockets in southern Syria won’t have to ship them anywhere. They can just fire them at Israel as soon as they are captured.
The US gave the Assad dynasty foreign aid directly until 2001, and indirectly through the UN since then. We were sworn military allies in Desert Storm. So to the average Syrian, the US is the reason why the Assads have been so hard to overthrow. It must be a little confusing for them to hear that we’ll be bombing targets in Syrian cities to “punish Assad”.
Those who argue for war against Syria are the same geniuses who thought we should support the dictators before. Of course, in the past decades our “experts” have also given US foreign aid to Idi Amin, Julius Nyerere, the Taliban, and even the genocidal maniac Pol Pot. Maybe if we had listened to George Washington and avoided foreign “political connections”, we would have saved a few trillion dollars and many lives. Here’s George: “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
The experts will of course dismiss George; he never went to Harvard, and didn’t get a Nobel Prize right after his inauguration ceremony. But where is the experts’ record of success? What do we have to show for the Americans who died in the Vietnamese civil war, or the Iraqi civil war, or the Lebanese civil war? We do of course have a debt approaching 17 trillion dollars, which is now bigger than our GDP. But other than bankruptcy, what legacy have the undeclared wars since 1945 built for our children?
Instead of giving our children yet another permanent Mideast war, let’s leave them a strong, financially secure, and morally decent United States. Cutting off all foreign aid to authoritarian regimes and terrorist groups would be a good start, and it won’t cost us a single expensive missile.
