Syria Is a Land of America’s Enemies, and We Should Stay Out

I appreciate the sobriety of our editorial on the fall of Bashar al-Assad: the brutal Syrian dictator, son of former brutal dictator Hafez al-Assad, and client propped up by the brutal Shiite jihadist regime in Iran and the mafia-style regime of the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. (And sprinkle in a little North Korean brutality on the nuclear weapons front.)

Six years ago, I penned a column titled “The Syria Fairy Tale Lives,” noting that I had been a longtime naysayer on American involvement in Syria (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here) and bemoaning the folly of the sharia-democracy project. By then it had been manifest for well over a decade that United States policy in the Middle East persisted in willful blindness to what remains the most basic, incorrigible fact about the region: the predominance of sharia supremacism. Fundamentalist Islam, which has developed for over a millennium, is not merely a religious creed; it is a comprehensive legal and societal framework that is self-consciously hostile to Western liberalism and, thus, to the principles of the American republic.

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.

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I appreciate the sobriety of our editorial on the fall of Bashar al-Assad: the brutal Syrian dictator, son of former brutal dictator Hafez al-Assad, and client propped up by the brutal Shiite jihadist regime in Iran and the mafia-style regime of the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. (And sprinkle in a little North Korean brutality on the nuclear weapons front.)

Six years ago, I penned a column titled “The Syria Fairy Tale Lives,” noting that I had been a longtime naysayer on American involvement in Syria (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here) and bemoaning the folly of the sharia-democracy project. By then it had been manifest for well over a decade that United States policy in the Middle East persisted in willful blindness to what remains the most basic, incorrigible fact about the region: the predominance of sharia supremacism. Fundamentalist Islam, which has developed for over a millennium, is not merely a religious creed; it is a comprehensive legal and societal framework that is self-consciously hostile to Western liberalism and, thus, to the principles of the American republic.

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.