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HARTMANN: Syria. President Obama had said, and I think it was probably not a wise thing to say, but nonetheless, he had said some time back if there was evidence that Syria was using poison gas on its people then that would be a red line. And if they stepped across that line he would react. And now, our own Government has basically called his bluff on this saying, ‘Yeah there is proof that Syria has used this gas. So what are you going to do?’

I have two thoughts on this. Number one, Russia (which is an ally of Syria) sent some weeks ago surface to air missiles to Syria. Now, the reason why a country gets surface to air missiles is to shoot down airplanes. John McCain was running around yesterday saying that he wants a no-fly zone over Syria right now.

How do you enforce a no fly zone? You do it by flying over the country yourself. In fact, the first thing you have to do is take out the surface to air missile installations. When we imposed a no-fly zone during the first Bush Administration on Saddam Hussein the first thing we did was blow up all of the radar installations and all of the surface to air missile installations that Saddam Hussein had and then we started flying over his country and enforcing the no-fly zone. Any time he’d shoot at us we’d just go, ‘There’s another one’ and we’d take them out.

So, do we really want to be blowing up the weaponry that Russia just provided them? This seems to me like a World War 1 kind of scenario where small stuff happens and big powers get involved and you end up with big problems.

I think it would be a mistake to enforce a no-fly zone and I don’t think that we should be involving ourselves in anybody’s civil wars. Let me explain why. This may sound heartless but ultimately I think it is the most heartfelt thing. And in fact, let me preface it by saying if we were going to involve ourselves in somebody’s internal affairs there’s stuff going on right now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that is worse than what is happening in Syria. In the DRC you’re talking about 4 or 5 million people killed. There are also hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions of people who have died in Sudan and South Sudan. But the DRC doesn’t have oil, and Sudan has some oil but the Chinese have pretty much locked it up and they didn’t realize that they had oil until a couple of years ago. And we don’t care about that.

But here’s why we shouldn’t involved ourselves in other people’s civil wars or other people’s revolutions. When the American Revolution happened, every state already had a local government that by and large thought of itself as American rather than British. This included communities, towns, counties, wards, etc. I mean it was all in place. We fought the revolutionary war all by ourselves. The French did loan us money and we did hire German mercenaries, Hessian mercenaries, but we fought it by ourselves. And, once we won, we were able to govern ourselves because we had been strong enough to overthrow the British, to throw the British out of our country.

This is a neo-conservative idea. It was applied to Afghanistan. It was applied to Iraq. It has been applied repeatedly to other countries over the years and not just by the United States. The problem with this idea is that we’re just going to support the local rebels and hope that they’re going to be George Washingtons despite the fact that they don’t have enough strength and structure. If internally, inside the country, they have the power to overthrow an oppressive government by themselves then they will have enough strength or structure to run that country once they get it. This is a really important point.

This is why when Bush said, ‘Yeah we’re going to go into Iraq and tear down Saddam Hussein and it’ll be over in a week, and the people will rise up and capitalism will be wonderful. We won’t even need to protect the museums and things.’ This was the libertarian idea that everything will work out. And now you’ve got an Iraq that has aligned itself with Iran and that is in absolute screaming chaos and is on the verge of fracturing into at least three countries with daily murders and no functioning infrastructure. It’s a libertarian paradise, i.e. dystopia.

So the reason why we should never assist anybody in their revolution other than perhaps preventing other people from intervening. We should just say let them fight it out. If these rebels actually think they can take on this government then god bless them and let them try. If they succeed, then they have the right to govern. If they succeed, they have the mechanism to govern. If they succeed, they have the authority to govern and they will govern. And if they don’t succeed people are going to die but they made that decision to do that. This is the decision that Robert E. Lee made in the United States. The South said ‘Okay we’re going to revolt against the North.’ They lost. A bunch of people died. But can you imagine if Mexico and Canada had involved themselves in our civil war? And they said, ‘Well, you know we really think The North’s banking industry has too much power so we’re going to support the South and the South won. And then, Mexico and Canada left and said, ‘Okay good now you run the country.’ But see even though the South won because they had external help they are not going to be able to govern the entire country because they don’t have the consensus with a majority of the people because they didn’t really win by their own moral and or physical force.

Now people will push back on this by saying wait a minute you’ve got countries that have dictatorships that have evil people running them. What about that? Don’t we have an obligation to stop those? And I would say no. we have an obligation to establish an example for how a country can be run minding its own business and to support institutions of democracy around the world. But had we started our revolutionary war war 15 years earlier we would have lost. And if the French came in and said we’re not just going to loan you money but we are going to fight on your behalf against the British and then the British got thrown out, we would not have the country we have now.

We should not be sticking our nose deciding the fate of other countries. It distorts things. You have to let these things play themselves out. Not only does it distort things it makes conflicts worse. I heard this debate on television the other day where people were sitting around saying we should just go into Syria and after we help the rebels we need to do some nation building. Excuse me?? We can’t build public school in Mississippi, but you want nation building in Syria? It’s not organic. It’s not healthy. We should not be involving ourselves in the internal politics of any country that is involved in revolution or civil war. We should support our ideals. We should actually live our ideals for a change. But we should not be intervening in my humble opinion.

Take a look at Thom Hartmann’s website.

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.