Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, in a video recording posted on the Internet on Sunday, urged Syrians not to rely on the West or Arab governments in their uprising to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
Live by the suicide bomb, die by the suicide bomb, eh Boy Assad?
Yes, I know it will be uncomfortable if we avoid directly striking Assad's regime and rely on local resistance that includes al Qaeda. But what can you do? Did we refuse to fight the Nazis because Soviet communists fought the Nazis, too? Heck, we armed the Soviets in World War II. I wouldn't suggest we should even think about arming al Qaeda rebels in Syria just because they hate Assad.
I never shed too many tears when an enemy chooses to fight another of our enemies.
But for our domestic liberals, that will be too much to bear. Everything is always too much to bear when it comes to enemies. We can't attack because--well, they have lots of reasons to oppose anything that lasts more than 6 months to achieve. So we should support local opposition. But local opposition isn't as pure as the League of Women Voters Vermont Chapter, so we can't support an insurgency. Or there could be another foreign problem brewing that we have to focus all of our energy on so as not to be distracted by the problem at hand. There is always a good reason to avoid doing something about a brutal enemy.
And really, this demonstrates the falsity of the anti-war side's claim that they are foreign policy "realists" while those who support fighting our enemies (the dreaded "Neo-Cons") are not. I've always been a "realist." And facing reality means that we can't avoid fighting Islamism as the root cause of our terrorism problem.
But as I've often said, "realism" left me and not the other way around. Modern anti-war "realists" take the Cold War example of siding with little anti-communist despots in order to defeat the big enemy of the Soviet Union and twist it into an excuse for cutting deals with anti-American dictators that leave the dictators in power. In essence, "realism" for the left becomes an excuse not to win rather than a tool to win the fight that counts.
So if we decide to support an insurgency to overthrow Assad rather than directly intervene, I'll be realistic and understand that we can't control who will take action against Assad. But our left will cringe and say that we can't support an insurgency that includes--no matter how small their role and no matter that we don't directly aid them--jihadis like al Qaeda.
I'm a realist about our left, too. They changed what being a "liberal" once meant (free enterprise and personal freedom) into intolerance and state control; and now are changing what being a "realist" means (mostly doing what it takes to win the important fight we can't afford to lose) into simply refusing to resist our enemies.
