Syria is not worth the trouble or treasure

This is not a strategy. And absent a strategy, it is not
even a decent warning.

Andrew Codevilla lays it out with elegance and precision, "What Is Syria to Us?" And the answer is pretty much a goose egg. The United States just wasted more than $100 million worth of precision weapons to accomplish exactly zero of military or strategic significance.

The U.S. strikes last week on suspected chemical weapons sites near Damascus and Homs exemplify how not to use military force. Their only consequence is to highlight the poverty of the foreign policy of which they are part: driven by questionable intelligence, the “CNN effect,” and an inability to come to grips with real problems.

The strikes did a little harm to Syrian leader Bashar al Assad, who is a dependent of Iran and Russia and who is nearly helpless vis à vis our newest enemy, Turkey. Iran is extending its reach to the Mediterranean and threatening war on Israel. Russia is solidifying hegemony over the Middle East. Turkey is making war on the Kurds, the only real allies the United States has had in the region in a generation. Instead of braking any of these ominous developments, the U.S. government, reverting to type, destroyed a few buildings and hyped its own virtues in garbled neo-Wilsonian lingo.

Read the whole thing.