New York Times Against Arming Syrian Rebels

Thankfully, the New York Times in an unsigned editorial this morning is coming out against military intervention in Syria. Excellently titled, "After Arming the Rebels, Then What?" it concludes:

Like most Americans, we are deeply uneasy about getting pulled into yet another war in the Middle East. Those urging stronger action seemed to have learned nothing from the past decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, which has sapped the United States and has produced results that are ambiguous at best.

This is exactly the right thing to emphasize as the war pigs clamor for antitank guns and no-fly zones. Have we learned nothing? Are we so bereft of intelligence that we repeat disastrous military commitments in the name of a fictional Lebensraum of the Western mind -- "democracy." How's "democracy" doing in Afghanistan? How's "democracy" doing in Iraq?

The Wall Street Journal reported this week what a no-fly zone would look like. Plans have been drawn up to enforce a no-fly zone from Jordan stretching 25 miles into Syria. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov reminded the West today that such a no-fly zone would be illegal and he rejected U.S. allegations of Syrian government poison gas use. Echoing UN Secretary Ban Ki moon (see Colum Lynch's Turtle Bay blog), Lavrov, according to The Associated Press, "said Saturday that the evidence of Syrian chemical weapons use cited by the U.S. is not reliable and doesn't meet requirements of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons."

He said the organization specifies that samples taken from blood, urine and clothing can be considered reliable evidence only if supervised by organization experts from the time they are taken up to delivery to a laboratory.

Peter Baker has a frontpage story, "Heavy Pressure Led to Decision by Obama on Syrian Arms," outlining the war going on within the Obama administration over Syria. Obama, Baker reports, is fighting hawks in the foreign policy establishment; he's trying to keep U.S. military involvement to a minimum. There's a good quote from Zbigniev Brzezinski:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said he was “baffled” by Mr. Obama’s decision to become more deeply involved. “What exactly is our objective?” he asked. “It’s not clear to me that every nondemocratic government in the world has to be removed by force.” 

The Syria war is a struggle for power, not democracy, he said. “Is that something we should be engaged in?”

Brzezinski, the architect of our current entrenched military occupation of the Middle East, has had a change of perspective in the decades since he helped formulate the Carter Doctrine.

It's important to keep in mind what we know from reading the paper every morning. Most of the rebels fighting in Syria, now beginning to be described in the Western press as insurgents, are foreign fighters responding to fatwas issued by prominent Sunni clerics calling for jihad. We know that these jihadi are no match for Hezbollah and the Syrian military, more weapons or no. As the fighting rages in the rebel-held Aleppo neighborhood of Sakhour, the opposition's only hope remains direct military intervention by the West.

Can Obama hold the line against the war pigs? He just might be able to. His legacy and the future of the Democratic Party depend on it, not to mention any hope for peace and the territorial integrity of the current Middle East.