Bret Stephens concludes his latest column with the most bizarre reference:

Maybe Americans will feel better after ceding the field [in Syria] to these characters [Russia and Iran]. But we won’t be safer. And as a former Chicago friend of Mr. Obama used to say, the chickens sometimes do come home to roost [bold mine-DL].

We all understand that this is just desperate fear-mongering. The Syrian conflict doesn’t seriously threaten American security, and it won’t make Americans less safe if the U.S. stays out of it. Syria’s conflict would start to threaten American security only if the U.S. opted to involve itself directly in the war. Americans will not be made safer by hastening the fall of the Syrian government, and if U.S. involvement escalated into a broader war with Iran it would pose a direct threat to the security of U.S. forces in the Gulf and Afghanistan.

Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to see such a hard-line interventionist cite Jeremiah Wright in a strained effort to pretend that the U.S. will suffer adverse consequences from staying out of the civil war in Syria. According to Stephens’ kind of thinking, coercive and aggressive U.S. policies in other parts of the world do not create future security threats, but the U.S. could suffer terrible consequences if it is not sending more weapons into a war zone and choosing not to bomb another government’s forces. It doesn’t seem to trouble Stephens that this makes absolutely no sense. This is a fairly standard hard-line assumption: the U.S. bears no responsibility for the destructive effects of its activist policies, but it somehow is responsible for events that are beyond its control in conflicts in which the U.S. is not involved.

It takes a fairly strange and dangerous mentality to see the Syrian conflict as “the dawn of a much wider Shiite-Sunni war” and then conclude that the U.S. needs to get into the middle of it. If the fighting in Syria is just the beginning of “a much wider Shiite-Sunni war,” that would be one of the best arguments yet for the U.S. to stay as far away from it as possible.