Neocons' Noses Into the Syrian Tent

And in the wake of Obama's decision to use air power against the Islamic State terrorists who are operating across the Syrian-Iraqi border, Diehl and other neocons are dusting off the old narrative. The neocons see Obama's decision as something that can be stretched from attacking non-state actors into attacking the state of Syria.

Responding to this political pressure last Friday, senior U.S. military officials said such an expansion of the bombing campaign had not been ruled out. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested U.S. openness to a Turkish plan for a no-fly zone over Syria.

"We've discussed all these possibilities and will continue to talk about what the Turks believe they will require," said Hagel. Dempsey added that "a buffer zone might at some point become a possibility," though he said it was not imminent.

But this mission creep would represent a major escalation of the U.S. involvement and represent a clear case of international aggression. President Obama is on thin enough ice with his rationalization for bombing terrorist targets inside Syria without the government's explicit permission (although Damascus has raised no formal objections).

If Obama were to order U.S. bombing attacks against Syria's military, he would have to concoct a new excuse, presumably citing the "responsibility to protect" doctrine which has no standing in international law unless approved by the United Nations Security Council.

The "R2P" claim also would be a poor fit for shielding a rebel army that is engaged in warfare against the established government of a country. In effect, the United States would be intervening in a civil war on the side of rebels whom the U.S. government had recruited, trained, armed and funded. Plus, the likely result of such a direct intervention -- as with Libya -- would be a victory not by these "moderates" but by extremist militias.

War-Rationale Sophistry

By destroying the Syrian air force, Obama also would be further discrediting his rationale for bombing terrorist sites inside Syria. The U.S. argument is that the attacks are justified to protect Iraq from cross-border raids that the Assad government has been unable to stop.

There is already plenty of chutzpah in Obama's legal argument, since the U.S. and its Sunni allies have been fueling the insurrection inside Syria. It's almost the classic case of children killing their parents and then demanding sympathy as orphans.

Obama, the Saudis, the Qataris and others have sponsored this civil war and now they cite it as an excuse to violate Syria's sovereignty. But the neocons want Obama to stretch the hypocrisy even further by destroying Syria's air force to make it impossible for the government to reclaim control of its territory.

The alternative to this destructive downward spiral would have been to seek a practical resolution of the civil war even it required Assad remaining in office for the near future. Based on the results of last June's election, it is clear that Assad retains the support of a substantial number of Syrians, particularly the Alawite, Shiite and Christian minorities who fear the extremism of the Sunni Islamists.

But Obama and the U.S. State Department have remained firmly in the saddle of their high horse in demanding that "Assad must go."

It hasn't helped that the neocon-dominated mainstream U.S. media has slanted its reporting consistently on the Syrian crisis, including a rush to judgment blaming Assad's regime for a mysterious Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Fixing Intel Around Syria Policy" and "Was Turkey Behind Syria-Sarin Attack?']

In his Monday column, Diehl cited the Assad regime's guilt in that chemical weapons attack as flat fact, much as he and his boss, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, stated as flat fact that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2002-03.

However, since Hiatt, Diehl and pretty much every other Washington neocon survived getting the Iraq-WMD story completely wrong, they are still around a decade later to make arrogant assertions about how the U.S. military must escalate the war in Syria. They are the camel whose long neck has followed its nose deeply into the Syrian tent.