by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner
Ostensibly, even an intervention of the most restricted sort in Syria, given the loud proclamations of the limited nature of cruise-missile attacks, should not pose geostrategic risks anything like costlier major ground operations of the sort we conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq. Continue reading “Counterintuitively Risky”
by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com
Russian President Vladimir Putin has a strange way of speaking 
straightforwardly, without all the artificial and “morally superior” airs one expects from Western politicians.
Earlier, for example, he wondered why Western leaders were supporting cannibals in Syria:
You will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras. Continue reading “Putin Puts Obama in Hot Seat: ‘What Will You Do If Rebels Are Ones Using Chemical Weapons?’”
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine
President Obama Saturday laid out the case for a military strike on Syria. He evoked the same rationales Secretary of State Kerry and others, including some conservatives, have been articulating for the last week. We’ve heard of “international norms,” “common understandings of decency,” the “international community” that codified a “normal prohibition against chemical weapons” in the Chemical Weapons Convention, the need to act to deter other rogue states like Iran, and the imperative to punish “crimes against humanity.” Continue reading “Bad Reasons for Bombing Syria”
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
What are the president’s strategic objectives in the present mess? Does he know?
There are four general strategic options — predicated on the political fact that either the Congress will approve the operation or that the Obama administration will ignore it if it doesn’t, and that Obama is not worried about either the present absence of both public support and any militarily credible allies, and that he need not explain our primary objectives that will be made up as we go along (e.g., punish WMD use, regime change, enhance U.S. security, help the insurgents, restore U.S. prestige, etc.) Continue reading “Now What?”
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
An older generation used to call the boredom of bad habits “reaching rock bottom”; the present variant perhaps is “jumping the shark” — that moment when the tiresome gimmicks no longer work, and the show is over. Continue reading “Miley Cyrus and Ugly Sex”
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
One of the problems that Barack Obama has in mounting an attack against the Assad regime is that the gambit violates every argument Barack Obama used against the Bush administration to establish his own anti-war candidacy. Continue reading “Obama Indicts Obama”
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Israel could be forgiven for having a siege mentality — given that at any moment, old frontline enemies Syria and Egypt might spill their violence over common borders.
The Arab Spring has thrown Israel’s once-predictable adversaries into the chaotic state of a Sudan or Somalia. The old understandings between Jerusalem and the Assad and Mubarak kleptocracies seem in limbo.
Yet these tragic Arab revolutions swirling around Israel are paradoxically aiding it, both strategically and politically — well beyond just the erosion of conventional Arab military strength. Continue reading “The Israeli Spring”
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
Most of the arguments pro and con for an intervention in Syria have already been made. Continue reading “Is The War to Save Face or Save Lives?”
by Raymond Ibrahim // Jihad Watch
By now it should be obvious that whenever the U.S. interferes in another nation’s politics in the name of “human rights,” that that is only 
a pretext. So it is in Syria, as Obama prepares to plunge America in a war with that nation, and, inevitably, its allies. The United States’ stated reason for intervention, as articulated by John Kerry, is that Syrian President Assad used Continue reading “Obama Crosses Red Line by Supporting Jihadi Terrorism”
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner
We are on the verge of a war with Syria. Yet I don’t think the administration has as of yet articulated what its aims are and thus is confused about the means of obtaining them. Is the point of the impending military action to remove Assad, engage his opposition, and foster a consensual society in his place, as if the U.S. can at last do
what so far the Arab Spring has not? To destroy enough of his assets to allow the insurgents (but who exactly are they?) to rebound somewhat? To establish a new American-enforced global statute that WMD use is not permissible in a way that a Rwanda, Grozny, or the Sudan apparently was? To Continue reading “What Is the Syria Plan?”
