Opinion: The road from Damascus — to Ukraine – CT Mirror

The Arab Spring was an epic fail; democracy, openness and good governance did not sweep the middle east or north Africa. One of the worst results was in Syria, where the protest movement became a civil war that was eventually won by the bad guys. The Assad regime, which had been merely oppressive, rose to the occasion and blossomed into something truly barbaric, even by local standards. It was 2012. We had been at war in Afghanistan for ten years, in Iraq for nine, with no end in sight in either. President Barack Obama’s first term had been four years of each; he had seen from the outside and from the inside what it looks like when we intervene militarily in that neighborhood, and he took a pass on Syria. Sure, we could have knocked the regime over on the battlefield; then what?  It wasn’t that we had been there before; we were there, and it was an intractable mess twice over. Although the cause was compelling and just, I was with him. We would have been fighting in or occupying three middle-eastern nations at once; at that point we could have hung our shingle out: Invasions R Us. If…
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