The crisis in Syria, the collapse of the Assad dictatorship and the rise of somebody who has been on the terrorist watch list and has said a ten million bounty on his head, but who now wears western style suit coats and talks like a moderate, is going to pose a real test for how smart the American foreign policy establishment can become. Now, let’s be clear, Syria is a mess. The Assad family, both father and son, killed hundreds of 1000s of people to stay in power, they drove millions into exile. They locked up 1000s and 1000s of people, tortured many of them. They had chemical weapons, which they used in their own people. This was really a nasty dictatorship. He was also the chief ally of Iran, and had funneled money to Hezbollah in Lebanon and helped cripple the Lebanese government, which at one time was probably as functioning a democracy as you had in the Middle East, but under sheer pressure from the Iranians and the Syrians, that process broke down badly. Hezbollah was created on Israel’s northern border, and everything was funneled through Syria to Hezbollah. So from a geopolitical standpoint, the collapse of the Assad dictatorship leaves Hezbollah with no method of getting support from Iran anymore, because that bridge has been destroyed, it also means the Hamas is even further weakened, and I think the Iranians are now looking at their entire empire in collapse. At the same time, the Russians, having gotten so totally invested in trying to conquer Ukraine, had no forces left to send into Syria, and the result was that the Russians, who had also been helpful in sustaining the Assad dictatorship, they left suddenly. Assad, who had been dictator for a long time, his father had been dictator before him, suddenly finds himself in an apartment in Moscow, along with his family, a place that’s much colder than Damascus, and he’s going to find that he’s basically a prisoner guest of the Putin regime. Now, Americans, particularly the foreign policy elite, are going to be tempted to overstate what this all means. They’re going to be tempted to suggest that, if only we intervene cleverly, that we can somehow get a democracy in a place which has had a dictatorship of crushing brutality. You’re going to suggest that the leader of the group that won the fight for Damascus, a man who who’s in terror organization, has been on a terrorist watch list because it was allied with al Qaeda, that somehow he’s matured, and he has playing the media perfectly. He’s talked about the fact, you know, when I was younger, I did a number of bad things, but now that I’ve gotten older and more mature, I realize one has to be realistic. I think personally, that the United States will be very careful about getting involved there. I hope that we will decide that we’ve learned a lesson, a painful, deep, bitter lesson in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and many years ago in Vietnam.

This is not our fight. This is not our job. We can be feel sad for people. We can hope they do better, but we should not send American troops and American money to get in the middle of that mess. We.