Syria

Remember how we had to intervene against the Libyan government because Kaddafi had supposedly threatened to massacre civilians? Yet now the Syrian government is not only threatening to massacre civilians, it is doing it, while we—whose intervention in Libya was putatively based on the Kantean categorical imperative to save lives, wherever tyrants threaten them—do nothing. Why the difference? Simple. Kaddafi was not a danger to the West, in fact he had made peace with the West; he had also given up his nuclear weapons program. So he wasn’t in a position to hurt us. Therefore we could enforce our Kantean categorical imperative against him without fear of harm. But the Syrian regime of Bashir Assad is an enemy and threat to the West, and has the ability and will to hurt us if we intervened in Syria, so we leave the Assad regime alone.

The above explanation makes the West’s behavior seem merely outrageously hypocritical. But the deeper truth of the matter is much worse than mere hypocrisy. Since the West is now run by the anti-West left, the West turns on its friends and allies (just as it has turned on itself), while it gives its enemies a free pass.

There are no words to condemn sufficiently the people—whether on the left, the neocon “right,” or the Republican center-right—who have supported our monstrous intrusion into Libya, and, before that, our interference in Egypt, another country whose leader was so fatuous as to ally himself with the U.S., before the U.S. facilitated his downfall.

See Barry Rubin’s latest on Syria, “Syrian Regime Flak Calls for Mass Murder; West Does Nothing.”

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June 15

Paul Mulshine writes:

Syria our enemy? News to anyone who understands the Mideast. They brutally crushed the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982. The Muslim brotherhood was linked to Al Qaeda. As for the Alawites, all I can say is what all we right-wingers say: The fascists are our friends.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 14, 2011 04:32 PM | Send