INTERFERENCE.

• Author: DeAtkine, Norvell B.

After decades of reporting from Syria by Western journalists who gained access to the Assad family regime by offering favorable stories about its behavior, Lee Smith, a Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, has broken from the pack to become the most astute observer of the Syrian regime and the civil war erupting there. In this article he makes a point that has not emerged from the multiple opinions being presented the American public.

Smith states that in the past many of our interventions have been in conformance with an idealistic desire to save foreign peoples, either from each other or from a brutal regime. He does not advocate such an American intervention to save the Syrian people from their rapacious regime but rather doing so as an instrument to further American interests.

Overturning the Syrian regime would be a massive blow against our real enemy in the Middle East, Iran. Syria is strategically vital to the Iranian expansionist designs, both in terms of war against Israel and the United States. Iran, which has used Syria as a stepping-stone to Sunni Hamas and Shi'a Hezbollah, will find it more difficult to aid either one. In fact Hamas has already moved away from Iran as the conflict in Syria moves closer to a...