This article is a response to C.R. Jones III's column More US Action Needed in Syria.
When will it end?
We're 14 years in and still have more than 10,000 troops deployed between our last two Middle Eastern battlefields (Iraq and Afghanistan). Those conflicts have cost more than $4 trillion, in addition to the lives of 6,840 U.S. military servicemen and women. Our foreign policy would be a lot like chess (as Mr. Jones suggests) if each piece cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year to deploy, maintain and move, if each square of the board were a city or a neighborhood occupied by innocent civilians whose homes and lives have been destroyed by the conflict, if each lost pawn had a loving family that missed it back home and if the game had no discernible objective or victory conditions.
Syria will be no different. President Obama has already promised the American people that the war against the Islamic State will not be a short one. Perhaps after we spend another few trillion dollars and thousands of lives, we'll kill enough of the IS leadership that the organization will weaken and splinter into smaller organizations, just as al-Qaeda did. However, just as the IS rose from the fractured remains of al-Qaeda and as al-Qaeda split from the mujaheddin, some other alphabet soup terrorist organization will take their place.
These organizations draw their strength from the sentiment that America is a violent oppressor of the Middle East and its people. Continuing to violently oppress people in the Middle East only plays into their recruiting mantra: For every terrorist we kill, two or three of his countrymen will use his death as justification for taking up arms themselves against his killer. Just like Heracles and the Hydra, we will never be able to defeat our foe by cutting off its regrowing heads.
The United States and the rest of the world should have learned from the more than a decade long conflict that the War on Terror cannot be won by hard power alone. President Obama's escalation of U.S. involvement in Syria not only flies in the face of previous promises to the contrary, but also shows that we still have not learned our lesson. Luckily for us, we're not the only ones failing the class — Russia is eager to take our place as the point-man in this conflict. While Russian military might be no more successful in combating terror than America was, I cannot more strongly encourage the U.S. to pass the baton. If they're foolish enough to take our place stuck in the quagmire, then I say we let them while we take the opportunity to regroup and find a more effective plan.