Last year, the government of Syria wasn’t on acceptable evil. The Syrian government had been caught using chemical weapons on it’s own people. The bloodshed had to stop. The United States military had to become involved.
Such was the moral certainty of the time.
In 2014, we have a new moral certainty. The moral certainty of our time is that the Islamic State is evil and must be stopped. To that end, U.S Representative Dana Rohrabacher has suggested that the government of Syria, last year’s intolerable evil, should become America’s ally in the new U.S. warm against the Islamic State.
Rohrabacher writes, “Alternatively (not to say controversially), we should reassess our relations with two now-odious names: Assad and Putin. We should remember to seek out the enemies of our enemies. Assad is a bloody brute, but his interests now lie more with the West than with any grotesque IS agenda. He is at least predictable, certainly more capable of making long-term deals with us than he is to survive victory by the insurgents he faces. He has in some degree protected Christians from genocidal attacks by these fanatical terrorists now running wild in that part of the world. Oddly, Bashir Assad and his Ba’athist regime now find themselves sharing interests with Israel.”
Once, Dana Rohrabacher demanded war to eliminate the evil of imaginary chemical weapons in Saddah Hussein’s Iraq. Now, he embraces a policy to support a government in Syria that is known to have used chemical weapons.
Where will our moral certainty lead us next? In 2015, will there be a new unacceptable evil enemy? Will members of Congress, next year, suggest that we join with the Islamic State in order to go to war against this new enemy? with so many enemies, who is not the enemy of our enemy?
Given that the moral reasoning used to support America’s involvement in wars in the Middle East has become so relativistic, wouldn’t we do better simply to remove ourselves from the conflicts?