Mac-Coleman

26 April 2013 –

Odds ‘N Ends

It was April 1980.  It was my first duty assignment in the Air Force, at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.  Janny and I were driving in Las Vegas.  The radio was dialed onto, of course, a country music station.  The DJ said that the next song was a new one by George Jones and was sure to be a classic.  He then played, "He Stopped Loving Her Today".  George Jones had not had a number one hit on his own for several years.  He was long past the incredible impact in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties of hits such as “Why Baby Why”, "White Lightning", “Tender Years”, “She Still Thinks I Care”, and “Walk Through This World With Me”.  They had exalted into the peerless pantheon of country singers.  Booze, drugs, a wastrel lifestyle, they all purtnear killed “No Show Jones” in the ‘seventies.  No matter, I cried when I heard him sing through the little speaker in our ’74 Dodge Diplomat.  We had his voice again to soothe us.  George Jones died this morning in a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.  He was eighty-one years old.  God Speed to you, Mr. Jones.  Good parents will always condemn your lifestyle.  Angels will always sing your songs.   

It has been ten days since the Boston Bombings.  Our legal system has set itself in motion.  We have dealt with one of the perpetrators.  We have the other in custody.  Now, what do we do as a people?  We need to put our flags at full mast again and get on with life.  Too many flags still hang at half-mast throughout Houston and, I am sure, throughout the nation.  Our enemies who seduced these young men into committing their evil deeds look upon the extended lowering of Old Glory as submission.  It tells our enemies that we care more about mourning and wringing our hands than we do about defending ourselves.  Let’s get on with it.  Let’s correct our communications barriers within our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.  Let’s refocus on the unholy war that is about us.  Then, let’s seize and do away with our enemies.  That requires a flag that flies undaunted. 

Our intelligence community has confirmed, and the Administration has made public, that Syrian government forces have used chemical weapons against rebel forces.  Previously, President Obama declared that using chemical weapons was a “red line”, the crossing of which would require U.S. intervention of some sort into this civil war.  My decades in the intelligence business taught me to ask a seminal question whenever I analyzed events/crises in the world:  “What does this have to do with U.S. strategic interests?”  This is the question that is not being asked or answered as we threaten to enter this fray. 

Syria under President Bashar al-Assad hates the United States, is an implacable enemy of Israel, and harbors many jihadists and professional agitators who wish us ill.  The country has no natural resources vital to the U.S. economy, nor is its trade with us more than dust on the accounting floor.  In the UN, Syria votes against U.S. interests as much as any other country on earth.  Syria is an irritant because it sits between our allies, Turkey and Israel, sits next to Iraq, and is a surrogate for more important players in the roil of Middle East intrigue.  All of this is under the Assad dictatorship.  We certainly do not want to support the current regime. 

The next question:  “How would a regime change significantly alter our strategic position in the region?”  Simply put, not much would change.  The rebels are not western-trained, modern democrats who would institute western-style political and societal reforms.  They hate us as well.  They would assume control of a country that still would have no compelling strategic value to the United States.  The new regime would still hate Israel, still be cold toward Turkey, and still vote the same way in the UN as does the current regime.  The new government also would probably continue to allow the Russian navy to use the port at Latakia.  No matter who runs Syria next year, nothing of strategic significance will change.      

That said, why did the President impose a “red line” on us and the combatants in this war?  Now that he has done it, he will either have to renege on his resolve or enter into someone else’s civil war.  Those are no-win choices.  We either show the world we can’t be trusted to do what we say or we enter a civil war that will bleed us of men, money, and prestige for nothing we don’t already have.  Our President has taken the control of our instruments of national power and put it into the hands of people who hate us—old regime or new regime.  He is acting as naively and as arrogantly as any neophyte in international relations can do.  In the words of the great sage and prophet, Bugs Bunny, “What a Maroon!”