Welcome Back Michael Scheuer: Idlib, Syria is Not America’s Concern

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After having his blog shut down by the GoDaddy.com thought police, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer is back with www.non-intervention2.com. On his new site, Scheuer takes aim squarely at one of his favorite targets, the warmongers in Washington D.C., personified in the late John McCain. Scheuer rightly states that Syria is of no interest to America, saying “Overall, the destiny of Idlib, its combatants, and its people are a matter of supreme indifference to Americans, who will get along just fine no matter what happens Syria.” He writes (abridged):

Now that the funeral festival staged for John McCain has concluded, it is worth considering a couple of attendant issues.

The first is a question. Why were veterans’ organizations so insistent that the flag be flown at half-mast for McCain for multiple days? Yes, he was a veteran and a POW. He also consistently sought ever-larger appropriations for the Department of Defense. But in the ranks of today’s veterans there are an inordinate number of men and women who survived the unnecessary and interventionist wars that McCain relentlessly advocated and often caused. These men and women are also the comrades of the many thousands of Marines and soldiers who were killed, wounded, or maimed in those unnecessary wars.

The second issue lies in the nature of most of the crowd that filled the National Cathedral for McCain’s third – but not last – funeral service. Taken as a whole, those who filled the pews are the enemies of all Americans who value the lives of their soldier-children, who believe a war only ought to be fought in self-defense, and the growing numbers of those who are seeing the extraordinary costs in lives, limbs, treasure, and civil liberties that the political establishment’s post-1945 military interventionism abroad has yielded.

The final issue is a more hope than fact. It seems appropriate that McCain went to his reward just as an issue emerged that would have wet his war-mongering whistle. The media reports that the Russian and Iranian militaries are preparing to stage a campaign in the Idlib area of Syria, which is identified as the “last” Islamist stronghold in the country. This contention, of course, is the standard media/military/government lie; Islamist guerrilla groups remain present throughout both Syria and Iraq, and, although they solidly hold little ground, they are attacking in both countries, particularly in Iraq. Anyway, the reality is, for Americans, that it does not matter a whit whether Iranian and Russian forces are triumphant or are beaten like a drum.

Well, McCain is gone, and, so far, no other voice has replaced his as the major war-demanding advocate in Washington. One may yet arise, of course, on the issue of Idlib. But the fact remains – as it did when McCain was alive — that no American life or interest has been killed or damaged in Syria since the war began there in 2011, save for the losses caused by the unwise decisions to go there by several American journalists and NGO workers, and the national government’s mindless decision to uselessly risk of the lives of U.S. Marines and soldiers.

Overall, the destiny of Idlib, its combatants, and its people are a matter of supreme indifference to Americans, who will get along just fine no matter what happens Syria.

Without McCain, the citizenry now has a chance to see the republic gradually return to sanity by becoming involved in wars only if its survival is at stake.