On Syria, our interventionists ensure America’s luck is running out

For more than two years the Syrian civil war has raged with no impact at all on the United States and its domestic or international interests. Notwithstanding the crocodile tears that have flowed from Mrs. Clinton, President Obama, the European Union, and the usual gang of senatorial war lovers — McCain, Graham, Lieberman, etc. — the Syrian civil war has not troubled genuine U.S. security interests a lick. But that reality is, of course, irrelevant to our bipartisan governing elite, and we now seem headed for yet another mindless foreign intervention.

As he stepped into the Secretary of State’s role, John Kerry must have wondered how he would ever surpass the record of Mrs. Clinton. In her four years in the position, Mrs. Clinton talked constantly, traveled endlessly, further institutionalized the insane, war-causing foreign policy goal of forcing the world to install her view of women’s rights; and scored a breathtaking diplomatic achievement — she bribed the Burmese junta into dealing with Washington and allowing an aging, gad-fly female poet to travel the world. Such of Mrs. Clinton’s predecessors as William Henry Seward, John Quincy Adams, and General George C. Marshall best make way for this unprecedented foreign-policy accomplishment.

After that performance poor Mr. Kerry had to move fast to make his name in history and what better method than that of intervening in a war in which no genuine U.S. national interest is at stake. Smacking his lips and muttering “Syria here I come!” Mr. Kerry met last week with the fundamentally anti-U.S. leaders of the “Syrian Resistance” — AKA: Al-Qaeda and its like-minded allies — and forked over $60 million in “non-lethal aid,” thereby laying the groundwork for greater U.S. participation in that none-of-our-business war.

In this action, Mr. Kerry demonstrated all the usual attributes of our bipartisan governing elite. As noted, we have no life-and-death interests at stake in Syria, so that is where Kerry and our leaders will focus their interest. This, rather than trying to fix, say, our open borders, which are facilitating the ability of Iran and the Sunni Islamists to wage war inside the United States. Kerry’s donation to the Syrian Islamists also underscores the utter contempt he and the governing elite have for the well-being of Americans. In a bankrupt country like today’s United States, Kerry gave away $60 million to America’s enemies, money that could be much better used or simply saved at home, and the waste of which elicited zero negative comments from all those wailing in despair over sequestration. Kerry like all of members of our governing elite defines his own worth and success by how much he can “help” foreigners, Americans be damned.

The swag Kerry delivered to the Syrian Islamists — there would be no telling military resistance to Asaad if it was not for this multinational mujahedin force — also was complemented by the requisite deception of the American people. The money Kerry squandered was accompanied by his bald-faced lie that the donation was non-lethal because it focused on communications gear, transportation assets, and humanitarian aid. In reality, all of this aid is absolutely meant to expand the lethality of Syria’s Islamist resistance. Sophisticated communications equipment makes it harder for Asaad’s forces to locate and destroy their foes; trucks and other vehicle make the Islamists more mobile, allowing them to stay a step ahead of the Syrian military and quickly reach targets that they formally had to take lengthy and dangerous hikes to attack; and humanitarian aid is always a key part of lethal assistance. It allows the mujahedin and their Saudi and other Gulf-state backers to care for the resistance’s civilian supporters with U.S. and Western donations and use their own to buy arms. That the aid Mr. Kerry delivered — with that given by the EU and other mindless, do-gooding interventionists — is entirely lethal in nature is clear. It makes us participants in the war and requires Kerry to deliberately deceive the American people by describing it as non-lethal.

So the good luck of Americans vis-à-vis Syria seems to be running out and yet another U.S. military intervention is on the horizon. In addition, Kerry’s ability to deliver $60 million to the anti-U.S. and Islamist Syrian resistance provides another glimpse into the far bigger problem of a federal government that increasingly believes itself beyond the control of the electorate that the Constitution designated as its master. Except for brief episodes of pandering to voters every four years, both parties operate as if the people and the federal government are distinct entities, and that the superior latter knows what is best for the inferior former. This is an idea that would have been abhorrent to the Founders. “Government is instituted for the common good,” John Adams wrote in 1776, “for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men …”

Kerry’s donation to America’s enemies is yet another example of our bipartisan governing elite’s — which is now, in Adams’s words, one “class of men” — stark unconcern for the nation, its people, and their posterity. Indeed, it is a direct and knowing assault on the citizens’ well-being because funding for the Syrian Islamists came, in part, from the Obama administration’s raising of payroll taxes on working Americans, a process that sadly amounts to business-as-usual for the federal government under both parties; that is: “Take from Americans who are barely getting by and give to foreigners who hate them.”

There is no decency or common-sense, let alone concern and respect for Americans, in Kerry’s action and the modus operandi of our political elites that it reflects. It is, however, more fuel for the growing notion that the resistance movement that America truly needs is one manned and led by U.S. citizens and bent on opposing a federal government that is increasingly and intolerably the open, active enemy of America’s Constitution, laws, economic solvency, and financial and political independence. When a government behaves in such a manner, Adams concluded, “the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right … to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.” Some interesting food for thought from Mr. Adams in these troubling days.

Author: Michael F. Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer worked at the CIA as an intelligence officer for 22 years. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden unit, and helped create its rendition program, which he ran for 40 months. He is an American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.