The Syrian Fiasco: A Case Of The “Empire First” Folly In Spades

If there was ever a moment that laid bare the utter stupidity and futility of Washington’s Empire First policy it surely emerged last week in the smoking ruins of Syria. The latter was the desultory culmination of Washington’s 13-years-long effort to destroy the legitimate government of Syria on the purported grounds that Assad was a brutal tyrant and plunderer of the country’s paltry wealth.

The fact is, he probably was just that. And might well have been among the worst of the dozens of tyrants who today oppress their citizens in nations large and small around the world. But then again, did God Almighty anoint Washington as some kind of planetary Good Shepard charged with bringing just and kind rule to all the peoples of the planet?

We think not. Indeed, maintenance of a sustainable, prosperous, free constitutional Republic requires fidelity to the opposite— a regime of small, solvent government including on the Pentagon side of the Potomac. Accordingly, the sole end of foreign policy should be safeguarding the security and liberty of the homeland, not proctoring the governing etiquette of rulers halfway way around the globe that pose no military threat whatsoever to America’s homeland security.

Yet Washington has seen fit during the last decade to pump-in upwards of $40 billion of overt and covert military aid, economic support and humanitarian assistance to a plethora of opposition Syrian forces for no discernible reason of homeland security. To the contrary, the expenditure of all this treasure and political capital was designed for no purpose other than to effect Regime Change in Damascus and to eject the Assad government from its control over the what were the remaining white areas of the Syrian map below as of just a few weeks back.

Yet the color coded regions all around what is now the vacuum of Assad’s fall tell you all you need to know about the sheer folly of this enterprise and why in truth Washington has mid-wifed yet another failed state; and has done so once again on the pretext of fighting terrorism—this time the ragged band of ISIS jihadists who briefly planted their black flags and brutal rule in the dusty towns of the Upper Euphrates centered in Raqqah, as roughly depicted by the purple area of the map.

The truth, however, is that the white areas including the Damascus region previously controlled by the Assad government were the true bulwark against a resurgence of the ISIS head-choppers, who had emerged in 2013-2014 from the ashes of Washington’s failed regime change intervention in Iraq. So even if the choice was between the lesser of two evils, anyone with his head-screwed on straight could see that bolstering, or at least tacitly tolerating, the secularist, pluralist Alawite regime in Damascus was far preferable to the ISIS Caliphate fanatics.

Stated differently, one failed Regime Change fiasco in Iraq surely warranted second thoughts about continued pursuit of a second attempt at Regime Change next door in Syria. After all, the menace of ISIS which had afflicted eastern Syria was the spawn of Washington’s disastrous intervention against Saddam Hussein. Yet like in the case of Assad, Hussein had posed no threat to America’s homeland security whatsoever but was nevertheless treated to the “shock and awe” of massive military attack and the gallows because he was alleged to be a plundering tyrant who wouldn’t play nice with the greedy Emirs who ruled the shared deserts and oilfields next door.

Alas, the Empire First geniuses on the banks of the Potomac didn’t get any of this. Their swell plan was to get rid of both the ISIS jihadists and the Assad regime at the same time. But in attempting to do so they ended up creating two new militarized monsters out of the economic dislocations and tribal clashes that resulted from the very civil war they had unleashed.