James Pierson / A Negative on Syria

I agree.  Merle

James Piereson / A Negative on Syria

The Obama administration is teed up to launch an attack on Syria in retaliation for the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in the civil war in that country. This will likely lead to another ill thought out intervention into a region where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between our friends and enemies.

What does it mean to “punish” the Assad regime? The only way to do that is to intervene in the civil war in an effort to topple the regime. That will open up a hornet’s nest of problems. Once engaged the U.S. will be led step by step into deeper involvement into the Syrian civil war. Is it likely that the leaders of a new regime will be any better from an American (or Israeli) point of view? They could be a good deal worse. An attack will ignite a wider war in the region, drawing Iran and Islamist groups into the conflict against the United States. Assad and his friends will retaliate against the U.S. and American interests in ways that are impossible to foresee. Civil wars have a way of turning ugly; unfortunately, outside intervention is likely to make a bad situation even worse.

Why is Syria any more urgent than Iran, which has been working for years to develop nuclear weapons to neutralize American power in the region? We seem to have forgotten about that problem. It wasn’t very long ago when someone drew a bright red line on that situation as well. Are chemical weapons in Syria more dangerous than nuclear weapons in Iran?

From a domestic point of view, a war in the Middle East will drive up oil prices and create the conditions for another recession in the U.S. and Europe. That should come as no surprise: every recession since 1973 has been associated with spikes in oil prices, usually caused by wars in the region.

This is a situation that calls for intermediate steps to slow down the march toward war: economic sanctions, a UN investigation to determine the facts, pressure on Assad’s allies to withhold supplies, and world-wide condemnation. Obama said in 2008 that the intervention in Iraq was “illegal.” The main difference between the two situations is that the case for intervention in Iraq was much stronger than that for an attack on Syria today. We would be well advised to resist the temptation to take a baseball bat to the Syrian hornet’s nest.

James Piereson is president of the William E. Simon Foundation and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute