President Obama: Don't Attack Syria For Israel's Sake. Please Be Smarter Than That.

“What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.“ – President Obama, from his famous speech he made on October 2, 2002, in opposition to the Iraq war.

President Obama, please do not deceive your people to justify a new aggressive war against a secular Arab state for the benefit of Israel and to the detriment of the national interests and international standing of your own country, as your predecessor foolishly did. America should not sacrifice its treasure and blood for Israel, who is headed by an arrogant liar, as you believe so yourself.

Attacking Iraq was a mistake big enough for one generation. To repeat that mistake by attacking Syria just a decade later is a reflection of institutional blindness and indifference to world public opinion in Washington.

Assad is not Saddam. He has never gassed his people, nor ever attacked a neighbour. All efforts to demonize his regime has failed because it is based on total fantasy and lies.

Should America, Britain, France, and Israel attack Syria based on false pretenses, and thereby dramatically escalate the conflict and alter its very nature, nobody in the Middle East, not Arab, Turk, Kurd, Persian, Pakistani, or Afghan, will see you as liberators and saviours. If America attacks Syria, it will lead to world war. And the catastrophe of a third world war will be on your hands and the hands of Israel, Mr. President.  

There is minimal public pressure on your administration to overthrow Assad. The majority of the American people want no part of it because they are wise and aware enough to see that no good outcome can come from overt U.S. military involvement in Syria. There is no moral argument to intervene. The humanitarian crisis would not exist if your CIA had not funded, trained, and armed Jihadist terrorists.

But let’s put all that aside, and look at this through the military lens. There is no guarantee that Syria will be Libya. It won’t be clean and quick, and soon forgotten. The consequences will linger for years, maybe even decades.

Israel’s Chief of Staff Moshe Levy questioned the wisdom of attacking Syria back in the late 1980s. America’s current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey has said that the rebels, many of whom are Al-Qaeda, won’t serve U.S. interests in a post-Assad Syria.

The best choice moving forward is for the United States to make peace with Assad, end money and arms to the Al-Qaeda linked rebels, ensure that Israel does not commit future aggressions against its neighbours, and build new productive and fruitful relationships with the current governments in the region.