The slug on Max Boot’s op-ed at the Washington Post on our bad options in Syria pretty much says it all:
We have lost the leverage to remove him without a massive military intervention, and in any case, it’s not clear his successors would be any better.
I would go farther. It is all but certain that his successors would be worse? Why are we supporting the greater evil? Additionally, a “massive military intervention” courts war with Russia, their interests in Syria are much greater than ours, and such a war would have no winners.
My view is that we should tread with a much lighter step in the Middle East. We have no friends there. There are no good alternatives. There are no benign outcomes. Only bad and worse.
America doesn’t need mid east oil as badly as China does. If we step back maybe they’ll get mired down there and fight with the Russians over Syria.
Worked well for ten years in the 80’s with Iran and Iraq.
The predicament that we are in is that we cannot conclude wars, and we keep adding new wars to the total underway. We’ve been in Somalia for 25 years, Afghanistan for 17, and Iraq for 15 (28 if you count Kuwait, which still has over 8,000 US troops). We are fighting all across Africa. We have special forces in eastern Ukraine (shooting at Russia’s Spetsnaz), and Philippines, and seem about to join Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
In all we have troops on the ground in 150 countries, one-fourth of the world total, and we are actively fighting in a dozen or more. The implications are appalling. We are headed for a historic defeat.
The only way we can continue these wars is by re-instituting the draft. And just how would the current generation of high schoolers and undergrads respond to that. I am old enough to remember the 60’s. It was ugly.
make that three-quarters of the world’s countries.