The Syrian Fiasco, Part 1

About 17 years ago the insufferable former general, Wesley Clark, reported on a talk he once had in the Pentagon:

“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Well, it took several years longer but now six of the seven countries mentioned in that famous memo have been thrown into utter chaos, where they stumble around the Middle East and North Africa as failed states and well-springs of barbarism, crime, economic collapse and terrorism. And the ludicrous thing is that every one of these calamities were the result of intentional policy on the banks of the Potomac.

So if any more proof is needed that Imperial Washington inhabits a loony bin this week’s demise of the sixth of these target states, Syria, is surely just that. It will now become another warlord-dominated no man’s land caught in the cross-hairs of maneuver by its neighbors—Turkey, Iran, Israel, Russia and, everywhere and always, the United States.

Still, perhaps the unfolding madness now overtaking the corpus of Syria will finally demonstrate that Empire First has been a catastrophe which must be abandoned once and for all. To layout the framework for that long overdue pivot back to an America First policy, we reach back to a picture we published five years ago. This was during his first time at bat, when the Donald made a tepid effort to bring home a few hundred troops and wind down Washington’s multi-front interventions and meddling in a tiny land with 20 million people, a GDP of just $40 billion, a per capita income of barely $2,000, no significant natural resources or industrial capacity and no capability to project any military power whatsoever beyond its own borders.

In short, there was not a single attribute of this troubled corner of the Levant that had any bearing on the America’s homeland security whatsoever. Still, the Donald got thoroughly rebuked by the UniParty blob on Capitol Hill for implicitly recognizing the obvious. As we said at the time (2019):

By a vote of 354-60 yesterday the U.S. House of Representative proved that Imperial Washington is addicted to war, and that the level of ignorance, bellicosity and mendacity among the people’s representative has reach appalling heights.

Having never voted for Washington’s pointless, illegal and destructive fomenting of Syria’s calamitous civil war in the first place, as the constitution requires, the bipartisan congressional mob actually had the gall to vote to keep US forces in the middle of a centuries old Kurd/Turk conflict that has zero implications for the security and safety of the American homeland. And we mean that as in zero, nichts, nada and nugatory.