The real goal in Syria: More conflict

Eric Ruder, Socialist Worker - Writing in the August 24 New York Times, Edward Luttwack, a military strategist with a long career at the highest levels of the foreign policy establishment, argued that a "prolonged stalemate is the only outcome that would not be damaging to American interests."

Translation: The longer that the combatants in Syria's bloody civil war--the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad on one side, and rebel fighters on the other--carry on killing one another, the better for the U.S.

"Maintaining a stalemate should be America's objective," Luttwack wrote. "And the only possible method for achieving this is to arm the rebels when it seems that Mr. Assad's forces are ascendant and to stop supplying the rebels if they actually seem to be winning. This strategy actually approximates the Obama administration's policy so far."

Remember that the next time you hear Barack Obama or anyone else claiming that the U.S. and other Western governments have to punish Assad's government for using chemical weapons for the sake of the Syrian people. Washington's humanitarian concerns are a veneer covering a strategy Luttwack that correctly characterized as prolonging a military conflict, with an inevitable cost of more lives lost.

During the Vietnam War, a U.S. Army officer declared: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Today in Syria, the terms are reversed: The U.S. hopes to "save" the country by not allowing Assad's regime to crush its opponents--in order to destroy it through a protracted civil war where no side wins.