Call off the dogs

You can sure hear them barking. The dogs of war are furious, frothing at the teeth, trying to bite through the chainlink fence between us and Syria like some rabid monsters. Doesn’t this all feel so familiar, just like the buildup to the second Iraq war? That was the war that distracted the entire planet while our government created the surveillance state, drone murder, and enabled the destruction of the world economy to the benefit of the wealthy and the detriment of the rest of us.

How stupid are we? We’ve seen it time and time again: The opposition party—whichever party it happens to be at the time—demands action on the part of the seated administration for some imagined foreign interest. The administration is nearly always loathe to take action, because let’s face it, it’s been a long time since wars were good for the economy. So the balance becomes, “Will I gain more votes by getting in or staying out?”

But, the administration will stick a toe in the water, maybe with a surgical strike against a related target, and suddenly the poll numbers go up. Of course they go up, the opposition party likes this particular action, and the supporting party thinks they’re supporting their own best interests by supporting their “team.” Since the administration actually sought the conflict, the second Iraq war was a rare exception to this pattern.

Still, on Aug. 20, 2012, President Obama shot his mouth off by answering opposition party complaints, when he said, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” the president said a year ago last week. “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

In the year since he made that statement, some media outlets have made the claim that he basically said that if Syria uses chemical weapons against it’s own people, we’ll send our soldiers in. Just read the statement. He didn’t commit to any such action, but now, he’s behaving as though he did—saber-rattling in exactly the way that political opposition mouthpieces have used to claim he’s created a credibility gap. In other words, they say, Obama must take action now, otherwise he’ll be perceived as toothless—and besides, he already said he would.

Except he didn’t. Look, police actions don’t make other countries like us. They haven’t for a long time. The idea that we would gain allies by or advance our interests by a strike against Bashar al-Assad is absurd and self-destructive.

If we were going in with “liberal” values, such as protecting civilians from a repressive regime, we would have gone in a long time ago. Some 1.5 million people have fled the country due to Syria’s civil war. Some 4 million have been internally displaced. If we cared one bit for those 1 million children displaced by war, we’d be there. Some 100,000 people have been killed by bullets, bombs and disease in this civil war. But less than 500 are killed by gas—we don’t even know who launched the attack—and we’re going to go in?

We’re facing another election-driven war. And we the people always seem to lose these wars.