Regardless of the
nobility of our motives, or of ghastly pictures shown each night on television,
we must be extremely wary of becoming involved militarily in conflicts
where the hatreds run deep, in societies where, traditionally, political accommodation
is non-existent. This is not to say that
we should ignore conflict, but we must be prepared to use the other instruments
of national power, i.e., the political, economic, and diplomatic to help to
terminate it. However we should keep in
mind what the eminent political philosopher, Hans Morgenthau, has observed:
Good
motives give assurance against deliberately bad policies;
they do
not guarantee the moral goodness and political success
of the policies
they inspire. What is important to know, is not
the
motives of the statesman, but his intellectual ability to
comprehend
the essentials of foreign policy, as well as his po-
litical
ability to translate what he has comprehended into suc-
cessful political action.[i]
In
1994-1995, I was a student at the US Army's Command and General Staff College. There, a former senior United Nations
representative in Sarajevo told the class during a presentation on the Balkan
Wars that Bosnian Government officials, as well as Bosnian Serb officials, both
wanted US forces on the ground immediately.
They wanted this so they could immediately start killing American
troops, thereby getting the US involved in the conflict on "their
side". Clearly a protracted war
such as the one being waged in Syria is the last type of conflict we want to
become engaged in.
In
fact, a SOF helicopter pilot who ferried Syrian troops during Operation Desert
Shield/Desert Storm said a Syrian soldier told him he would rather be
killing Americans than Iraqis. We do not need to get involved there.
STAY
OUT OF SYRIA!
Gonzalo I. Vergara, Lt. Col., USAF (Ret).
Gonzalo I. Vergara, Lt. Col., USAF (Ret).
[i].
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power
and Peace, 4th Ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), p.6.
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