About the time of the 2003 Iraq war, unleashed by the United States on false pretexts, the travel trade developed a smart line: “Visit America before America visits you.” The gag was nearer reality than its authors may have known.

There has hardly been a year since 1945 when US forces have not been at war in other people’s lands. It’s hard to see how each of these, or even most of these, could have been “just” or “moral”, no matter what the value system you purport to defend, or even if saints were doing the fighting. (If the US cause were to be deemed mostly moral, the corollary is that the rest of the world espouses unworthy causes when facing America’s military machine.)
As we look at the Syrian situation, the irony is that the present US leader, Barack Obama, who made a name opposing President George W. Bush’s bullying attack in Iraq, and picked up the Nobel prize for peace as he appeared to possess the authentic voice espousing his country’s military disengagement and giving his people a chance to re-connect with the rest of the world on a footing of equality and sympathy, now looks set to extend his country’s infamous tradition of being in a state of war with one country or another.
As these lines are being written, the US is readying itself to strike Syria with cruise missiles in defiance of the United Nations, against the counsel of its European allies save France, and in the face of emerging opinion inside the US. In short, Mr Obama has been going solo. He now says he will consult Congress but believes Syria should be attacked. US Presidents have undertaken military action beyond US borders without Congressional authorisation. But, in principle, this can be done if the President can demonstrate that America’s security is at stake. No such thing is demonstrable in the Syrian theatre.
Mr Obama appears to be only too conscious that he is the supreme commander of the most powerful armed contingents the world has known, and can get away with murder. By expressly intending to bypass the UN, he gives notice that he thinks nothing of trifling with legality of the international system, and in doing so sets a dangerous precedent for bloody-minded state and non-state actors whose domain has expanded before our eyes. If America behaves illegally, it degrades itself and undercuts its potential to weigh in against those who intend doing the same.
The Obama regime says it has conclusive proof Mr Assad’s forces used chemical weapons against their military opponents in the ongoing civil war and against Syria’s non-combatant civilian population, hundreds of whom — including children — died in a sarin gas attack on August 21 near Damascus. But it refuses to share its intelligence findings with the UN Security Council whose own inspectors are in the process of analysing what they have picked up on the ground in Syria. No wonder, Mr Obama’s assertions are under interrogation internationally, and in his own country.
In any case, after the mayhem caused by American intervention in Iraq and Libya, the ugly and destabilising consequences of which simply refuse to go away, only a fool’s optimism can persuade anyone to place trust in America’s word in these matters. It is hard not to recall that under an earlier US President, falsehood paraded as truth to make the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that would be discharged against the West any minute.
By the time these lines are read, it is quite likely the war around Syria would have begun. And it is hard to see how the US leadership, whatever it may want us to believe, can only afford to launch an attack against the Syrian ruler and his cohorts (not that that is justifiable under international law), leaving untouched Syria’s principal backer Iran, which will be directly impacted by a display of American military hegemonism in its backyard.
Iran has the potential to hurt US interests as well as those of America’s regional allies in the eastern Mediterranean. If it possesses retaliatory powers, it can retaliate against a brazen Western or Israeli move aimed at Damascus or itself unless it is neutralised before it can do so. In short, we are looking at a military conflagration the outer peripheries of which are difficult to ascertain, and whose unpredictable consequences can cause severe pain beyond the arena of cowboy action instigated by the Americans and cheered on by the French, who seem proud to practise imperialism with socialist characteristics under President Francois Hollande these days.
Mr Obama says he must go to war because his red line for Syria — that the Assad regime must not deploy chemical weapons — was violated. But from where does the US leader derive the right to draw red lines for the world when his own land is not under attack, in this case from the Syrians?
No proof is yet forthcoming that it is the Assad government that used chemical gas and not his armed opponents (who have done so before), but Mr Obama wants to punish Mr Assad anyway. Why? Because his credibility (as a man of his word) will be in shreds in the eyes of the Iranians if he doesn’t move against Mr Assad after chemical weapons have been used (no matter who used them), and if that’s the case then Iran can defy America in the future. Would the American leader have accepted such debasing logic if Moscow had offered it?
The US President should just bear in mind that long before his credibility suffers in the eyes of Tehran, it is depleted in the eyes of the world for doing the wrong thing and violating the UN Charter even as his country sits on the UN Security Council as a permanent member. War makers have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but no Nobel peace laureate has turned a war monger before.