The snippet below was written by Ernesto Londoño and Ed O’Keefe and published in the Washington Post.
An imminent U.S. strike on Syrian government targets in response to the alleged gassing of civilians last week has the potential to draw the United States into the country’s civil war, former U.S. officials said Tuesday, warning that history doesn’t bode well for such limited retaliatory interventions.I opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and despite the fact that if we go to war against Syria it will largely be for humanitarian reasons, I will probably oppose any such action there, as well. As I have written before, there are no good options in this case. We cannot support Assad for obvious reasons, but for reasons that are equally obvious we absolutely should not be supporting the Islamist forces against him.
The best historical parallels — the 1998 cruise missile strikes on targets in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan — are rife with unintended consequences and feature little success.
“The one thing we should learn is you can’t get a little bit pregnant,” said retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni...
Barack Obama has an exceedingly clear track record of supporting political Islam in the Middle East and if the US goes to war in Syria it will be supporting Islamist groups in that country, as well.
In truth, I am a bit ambivalent in this case, given how Assad is behaving toward his own people. So, while I was firmly and unalterably opposed to the war in Iraq, I am a bit more squishy on this one. I am, of course, concerned that Israel could easily get swept into the conflict.
The very last thing that we need to see are IDF incursions into sovereign Syrian territory or what would be considerably worse, Syrian military incursions in to sovereign Israeli territory.
In any case, the clouds are darkening and war drums are pounding.
