Meditations upon the Classic Blunders

Once upon a time, there was a turtle who was about to swim across a river. As he started to wade in, he heard a small voice saying, "If you're going to cross the river, let me ride across on your back too."

The turtle looked and found that the small voice belonged to a scorpion. "No," the turtle said. "If I let you ride on my back, you will sting me and I will die."

"I won't sting you," promised the scorpion.  "We both want to get to the other side of the river. If I sting you, I won't make it across either. It's in my own best interest not to sting you."

"But you will," replied the turtle. "It is your nature. You make promises now, but when the time comes, I know that you will sting me."

The conversation went on like this for a while, and at length, the scorpion convinced the turtle that it would not sting him. Reluctantly, the turtle allowed the scorpion to climb onto his back, waded into the river, and began to swim across.

As the opposite shore began to come into view, the scorpion stung the turtle.

The venom spread quickly, and the turtle, already beginning to slip into the water, cried out, "Why?! Why have you done this to me? Now we are both going to drown! Why?"

The scorpion simply shrugged and said, "Welcome to the Middle East."

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This story is the first thing I thought of when I heard that our nation is going to start supplying weapons and support to anti-government rebels in Syria.

The hostility of the current Syrian government toward our nation and toward our allies and interests in the region is well documented. But I'm not convinced that overthrowing (or helping to overthrow) that government is the answer. We have no guarantee that the government that replaces it will be any better than—or even as good as—the current one.

We all got excited about the Arab Spring movement a couple of years ago. Has it really helped? Has it resulted in more enlightened governments, greater recognition of human rights, and greater safety and stability in the region? In Egypt, at least, the answer seems to be 'No'.  The Egyptian movement just replaced one oppressive government with a slightly different oppressive government.  There's already talk of another overthrow movement.

Do we expect the overthrow of the current Syrian regime to end differently? If so, why?

Back in the 1980s, we as a nation sent weapons and support to Afghanistan to help the Mujahideen combat Soviet invaders. We saw them as the lesser of the two evils. But the Afghani Mujahideen evolved into the Taliban. Our investment in defeating Communism in western Asia came back and bit us in the butt.  It's a classic example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, or as Terry Goodkind calls it, Wizard's Second Rule: "The greatest harm can result from the best intentions."

Do we expect the overthrow of the current Syrian regime to end differently? If so, why?

Our current political leadership was elected largely on American discontent with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that same government wants to throw us into the middle of a civil war in Syria? Where's the outrage now? Where are the protests, the vitriolic commentaries from the mainstream media, the celebrities speaking out against our involvement in other nations' internal affairs?

To me, as an American citizen, it comes down to this: There are too many people in that part of the world, and especially too many in positions of power, who value American deaths more than they value their own lives.  There is no way to have a productive relationship—political, military or otherwise—with people like this.

I hope that this decision does not lead us into a land war in Asia—or worse yet, another terrorist attack on our own soil in twenty or thirty years.