Who says we have a do-nothing Congress? Who says that our men and women on Capitol
Hill are completely polarized and can’t agree on anything? Just this week, strong majorities of both
parties decided after almost no debate to embrace a tiny rag-tag outfit of
folks in Syria and lavish them with weapons.
We don’t need no stinkin’ debate when it comes time to littering the
Middle East with weapons. We’ve got ‘em,
they need ‘em, so let’s just send ‘em and watch the killin’ begin! Thank God our Congress is so decisive.
Honestly, I’m pretty confident that our Congress knows
virtually nothing about the Syrian “moderates” who they’ve decided to arm. My guess is that all Syrians have to do is
announce that they’re willing to fight ISIS and aren’t supporting Assad, and
they can claim a U.S. manufactured machine gun free of charge. But who are these guys? What gives us any confidence that this won’t
be just another U.S.-botched adventure in an area where we seem to have a lower
batting average than most pitchers? If we
arm “Group Good” thinking they will fight “Group Evil,” knowing that Group Good
is likely to be disorganized, non-motivated and generally inept, won’t our
weapons eventually end up in the hands of Group Evil? It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out,
and yet our representatives in Washington didn’t even think that scenario was
worthy of debate. It almost makes you long for the days of the
Government shutdown. At least then, we
weren’t throwing gasoline onto fires.
My friends, I’m not here to defend ISIS, which is obviously
state of the art when it comes to depravity.
I’m also not here to call for isolationism, or to deny that a group that
has been described as Al Qaeda on steroids cannot possibly threaten U.S.
interests. What I am saying is that if
all the hype about ISIS is true -- if they truly are big, bad, and hell-bent on
destroying Denver no less than Damascus -- we’re not going to defeat them merely
with air power and an army composed of Billy Boy and his Droogies (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o6i5H3_TqQ
if you haven’t memorized A Clockwork
Orange like I have). You can take Billy Boy’s knife out of his
hands and replace it with an Uzi, but that doesn’t mean he can defeat
Isis. It just means that soon enough
Isis will get a brand spanking new Uzi.
So, is ISIS a huge international threat or isn’t it? If it isn’t, maybe we should think twice
before we risk increasing its stock of weapons.
And if it is, maybe we should consider leading an army that will destroy
it. But that means that our soldiers
would have to become part of that army.
We can’t simply watch the fight from the cheap seats. Wars don’t work that way. They get decided in villages, towns and
cities. And they get decided largely by
boots on the ground. Unless we’re
prepared to do to Syria what Truman did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
victorious side will be the victorious army.
You don’t have to be Napoleon to figure that out.
Unfortunately, Washington seems to run these days by
politics. No matter what part of
Pennsylvania Avenue we’re talking about, the signals are all the same. We don’t have the belly to fight a war that
will risk American lives. We care, but
not enough to make real sacrifices. That,
at least, is the message I’m getting. And
you can better believe that this same message is being spun all over the Middle
East by our enemies. They’re saying that
while the U.S. is happy to kill Arabs ourselves, and to assist one group of Arabs
in killing another groups of Arabs, we aren’t willing to get our own hands
bloody. I fear that this message will be a nice
recruiting tool for anti-American sentiment, as if they needed more such
sentiment in that part of the world.
Perhaps the die is cast now.
Perhaps we have crossed the Rubicon in deciding to wage a no-fuss,
no-muss war. Perhaps our plan is to arm
Billy Boy and his Droogies, see what happens, and if turns out that our troops
are needed then we can send them. But I
don’t like the optics of what we’re doing.
I’m haunted by that old line, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth
doing right.” If that “something” is
fighting a war, I think it requires sending in some troops. And if we don’t think it’s worth sending troops,
then why we getting so involved in the first place? Something here is just not adding up.
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