Retired Army Major General Robert Scales, who used to run the Army’s War College, writes today that the officers he’s talking to are against waging war on Syria. Excerpt:

They are repelled by the hypocrisy of a media blitz that warns against the return of Hitlerism but privately acknowledges that the motive for risking American lives is our “responsibility to protect” the world’s innocents. Prospective U.S. action in Syria is not about threats to American security. The U.S. military’s civilian masters privately are proud that they are motivated by guilt over slaughters in Rwanda, Sudan and Kosovo and not by any systemic threat to our country.

They are outraged by the fact that what may happen is an act of war and a willingness to risk American lives to make up for a slip of the tongue about “red lines.” These acts would be for retribution and to restore the reputation of a president. Our serving professionals make the point that killing more Syrians won’t deter Iranian resolve to confront us. The Iranians have already gotten the message.

Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain faces down an actual Syrian-American Christian telling him that an Islamist victory would mean the annihilation of her people back home, and tells her that he knows better, that he’s been to Syria and met with Ahmed Chalabi the Free Syrian Army, and he knows that they are good guys, etc.

McCain may be right, but even if he is, the FSA are the Mensheviks — moderate revolutionaries who are doomed to lose a showdown with the more radical revolutionaries, who hold the upper hand. The New Yorker‘s Raina Abouzeid has been in Syria too, talking to the Islamist rebels. From her report:

The men were openly disdainful of the Free Syrian Army units, saying they were engaged in “tourism” well behind the front, and were also openly hostile to the Alawites, or Nusayris, as they called them. “Even the Shiites have declared them kuffar [nonbelievers],” said one. “They are all the same. They view us Sunnis as the enemy; they are all involved in the war against us,” said another. “They won’t want to stay here after this,” said a third, meaning after they’d swept through the villages. The men also mocked the Muslim Brotherhood as inadequately committed to its faith.

“We call the Muslim Brotherhood ‘whatever the audience wants,’ ” said Mohammad, the Syrian Islamist fighter. He wore green military camouflage pants and a black T-shirt bearing the Islamic shahada in white script. “If the people say they want Sharia, they say they want it. If the people say they want democracy, they say they want it. They just want power.”

The very concept of moderate Islam was false, Omar claimed. “There’s no such thing—it is a modern expression,” he said. “A moderate Islamist means an Islamist who walks with them, who agrees with them, with the Americans, the Europeans, and Iran.”

More:

“The decision-makers in this country will be those with military power,” Mohammad said. “If they”—the F.S.A. and Syrian political opposition—“want a secular state and have the military power to create one, let them. If they are going to confront us because of our project, we will confront them. We are fighting for religion, what are they fighting for?”

Right, so the United States, under the Obama-Kerry-McCain plan, will throw cruise missiles at the Assad regime, hastening its collapse, at which point the civil war will intensify, and the jihadists will win. They are fighting for religion, and they are more fanatical, and more powerful. Once they triumph, they will run a radical Islamist state that will bring Talibanism to Syria, resulting in the massacre of all people, Muslim, Christian, and secular, who stand in their way. And as this excerpt shows, the US will buy absolutely no goodwill with these cutthroats for having aided their cause. But the hawks, humanitarian and otherwise, will have clean consciences, because they Did Something.

They sure will have done something. They would have turned the US military into be Al-Qaeda’s Air Force.