That infamous quote for my title came from the mouths of President George W. Bush. The man whose library is whitewashing his terrible foreign policy record, and it seems the same chorus of ‘liberal hawks’ are calling again for another Middle Eastern war, hoping we “get over Iraq” and claiming that this war is different. The first batter up is Tom Friedman, aka the Stache, calling for yet another occupation. As the Nation’s Greg Mitchell pointed out, maybe it will only take another Friedman Unit. And now the New York Times Bill Keller, someone who advocated for a Syrian war in 2003 on the basis that Iraq was “too easy and too quick”, and is now repeating that claim, while having the hubris to put the onus of opposing intervention on those who opposed the last one, instead of, you know, the people that got the last one wrong like Keller. Sorry Bill, America won’t get fooled again.
I don’t want to go in with guns blazing, but we should recall our ambassador if we haven’t already and signal that we favor the fight for freedom against a despotic regime. That is what we proclaimed for all in 1776 and what we should always back up in some fashion.
We’re supporting the Free Syrian Army, the opposing group, we’ve called for Assad to step down, and we are sending non-lethal aid to the rebels. We’ve taken a clear stand against tyranny, but thankfully we so far haven’t been sucked into another war either.
U.S. policy circles are in somewhat of a quandary: they want to give arms to Syrian rebels but magic arms that can defeat the Syrian government while being powerless against the Israeli military.
The Iraq experience has demonstrated that the Middle East is not brimming with Enlightenment-style patriots eager to push multi-ethnic, mutli-confessional republics. If you remember, the Bush Administration was pushing Ahmed Chalabi as the “George Washington” of Iraq. Mr Chalabi had only infinitesimal public support and disappeared from the Iraqi government when he couldn’t even hold his seat in parliament. Later evidence emerged that, not only might he be guilty of fraud in Jordan, but he might have been an Iranian agent all along.
As things stand right now, we don’t have a Mr Chalabi on whom to pin our false hopes for Syria.
Absent that, any intervention we undertake will flail about dangerously, unmoored from any discernible political goals. After the experience of trying to bribe the southern half of Vietnam into accepting a government we invented for them, after the experience of turning Iraq into an ungovernable mess, and after the experience of trying to get the Afghans to love a central government that is corrupt when it is not ineffectual and ineffectual when it is not corrupt, we should only join this fight when we actually have some positive political outcome we want to see. Recent examples: Kosovo and Bosnia.
Otherwise, let me tell you, there are a lot dead Vietnamese and dead Iraqis as mute witnesses to the immoral folly of “trying to do good” without a political goal. Like the French Revolution, political failure leads to slaughter.