EDITORS: Georgie Anne Geyer is taking a one-week vacation and will not file columns dated for May 6 or May 9. Her regular schedule resumes with the column for May 13.
WASHINGTON -- Turner Classics has been playing and replaying the great film "Lawrence of Arabia" this year. Perhaps this is some backward or perverted honor of the now-aging "Arab Spring," or perhaps it is simply because Peter O'Toole makes such a magnificent T.E. Lawrence, the desert-mad Brit who led the Arabs to moments of grandeur in World War I.
But after catching one's breath at all those camels galloping across the sands of Arabia, there is one short scene after "Awrence" and his devoted Arabs have "taken Damascus and thus Syria" that explains the gnawing problems that even today rip to shreds any real hope for the region.
The new conquerors are meeting in an elegant hall, while the British military waits across town in rage. Lawrence thinks he is doling out tasks and responsibilities in order to keep his own mates out of it. But one tribe will not give up the water plant it controls; another cannot provide oil without the water; and so it goes, until Lawrence realizes that they cannot run even a city they have "conquered" without British engineers, accountants and generals. At this consummate realization, Lawrence calls it all off, the Arabs return to their tribes, and Lawrence returns to Cairo and eventually to England.
In so many ways, this remains the story of the Arab world today. Even great Egypt cannot bring the promise of the Arab Spring, born in its own Tahrir Square, to fruition. Muslims are killing Copts with relish again, police are beating students and the (more or less) ruling Muslim Brotherhood is woefully incapable of putting together a balanced, moderate state.
Even the most stupendously modern city-state in the Middle East -- the skyscraper-mad Dubai -- was designed without a garbage system, so thousands of trucks have to haul the garbage out every week.
Indeed, garbage seems to be a major problem for many Third World countries that take inordinate pleasure in their areas of development. Bangalore is supposed to be India's computer center of advanced modernity, but garbage is stacked in heaps all around that beautiful city.
It is a rather simple story, really, the modern emanation of the ancient Romans, Macedonians and Assyrians. These men, too, were too proud (arrogant, anyone?) to do any practical work. Battling, stealing and building great towers to themselves are what they deem themselves worthy of.
So now we come to Syria, which manages to be in the headlines every day, but only for fighting, destroying and killing. As with the protagonists of the Arab Spring (we'll leave the Assyrians to history), we can't figure out for the life of us what to do with the Syrians. The professional interventionists, who believe we should, and can, solve every moral and military problem on Earth, are trying to shame President Obama into "going in." The Americans who spell problems in terms of B-a-g-h-d-a-d and A-f-g-h-a-n-i-s-t-a-n are horrified that we would be so insane as to repeat the disastrous past.
As for President Obama, he got stuck on his "red line" in case Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons -- we don't know yet whether he has -- but Obama also sees western Syria is filled with powerful anti-aircraft resources, almost surely supplied by the Russians and/or Iran, the Assads' two supporters, that could be deadly in any American air campaign.
The U.S. has been trying to figure out which group of Syrian anti-Assad fighters is "moderate," always a tricky business, and there do appear to be some capable moderate leaders. Nevertheless, there are more and more Islamist fighters who are allying themselves with al-Qaida.
Writers and analysts who know Syria, such as David Gardner, who writes for the Financial Times, says that the Assads -- as leaders of the Alawite minority that has led the fissiparous nation since 1969 -- see their country as one huge mega-militia. They now control only half the country and rely on the Iranians to protect them.
President Assad, analysts are saying, is keeping one pathway open to the former mountainous homeland of the Alawites, an offbeat tribe whose form of Islam has some similarities to Christianity. The Assads already have considerable military help from Hezbollah, the militia in Lebanon that has kept that formerly peaceable country at war internally for the last 30 years.
But should the United States do something in Syria or not?
Every argument made for our involvement in Syria is first put forward as a "small step." We would control only the air; we would start with military trainers to help the moderates; we would supply those moderates with weapons, food and strategy. Actually, some on the Obama "Syria page" say they do not even want the rebels to win yet because they are not sure how this could be timed to keep the Islamists out of power.
And that's a good thing, because there is no timing in an internal civil conflict like this. If we haven't learned this from Vietnam and Cambodia, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, what have we learned from them?
Have we learned that the Iraq war, which was going to "pay for itself" with the oil wealth we would open for the Iraqis, and the Afghan war have together cost us $6 trillion, including the care for wounded GIs in the years to come? Have we figured out that, since most of the countries in those regions are filled with men who bitterly resent Americans on their ground, our presence causes the local men to fight us? Have we not figured out that all the talk about only-getting-in-at-the-start is exactly what began in Vietnam and soon led, step by step, to 500,000 Yankees in Indochina?
Should we get into Syria? Good Lord Almighty -- NO!
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/history-teach-us-not-intervene-syria-213046312.html
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