Permanent War Is Permanent: Who Wants to DIe for Syria?

Or rather, as Bob Dreyfus points out at The Nation, who wants to die for Al Qaeda in Syria?

With the apparent decision to arm the Syrian rebels, President Obama looks like he’s going to go kersplat! onto his face and land smack dab in the Syrian quagmire.

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In fact, it may be too late for the United States to alter the course of the war. The commander of the Syrian Military Council himself has flatly turned down Secretary of State John Kerry’s invitation to attend a peace conference, insisting instead that the rebels get advanced, high-tech weapons. In recent weeks the Syrian government has made important battlefield advances, and by all accounts the tide of war has turned sharply against the Saudi Arabia– and Qatar-backed fighters, the Al Qaeda forces and others.

As in Vietnam, when the United States persisted in that hopeless war in part because it felt like to withdraw would damage American credibility, in Syria there is a real chance the President Obama will slide all the way down the slope to full-scale war simply because he won’t want to tolerate an Assad victory.

BooMan

If this seems prudent or sane to you, you are probably crazy. We all know better than to trust government estimates of the cost of military intervention, but let's go with the $50 million/day to create a limited no-fly zone in southern Syria. How many days are we willing to pay that $50 million? Five hundred days? A thousand days? What was it in Iraq? Over three thousand days? Followed by trillions of dollars more for a full-on invasion and decade-long occupation?

Once we put our skin in the game and start incurring costs, there is no end game but victory, and there can be no victory without escalation. We will own an irreparably broken country. Again.

And the American people are not going to stand for it.

Yes, we are. Just like we did in Vietnam, just like we did in Iraq, just like we're still doing in Afghanistan.

Trust has been broken. This is a terrible idea.

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Nonetheless, we should expect our foreign relations with Russia and Iraq to immediately go into the toilet and stay there. We should expect to become the target of Iranian/Hizbollah/Shiite-inspired terrorism attacks. We should even expect some Sunnis to attack us just for being in Jordan.

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The small-scale use of sarin would be an insufficient reason for our country to assume this degree of risk and cost. And literally no one will thank us for our efforts.

Intervening in Syria gains us nothing but death, bankruptcy and even more implacable enemies.

Oh, and permanent political victory for repugs who get to condemn Democrats for both cowardice (not nuking Syria and Iran) and financially ruining the nation.