Dr. Bashar Assad is a wicked, conscienceless dictator. He has blood on his hands, and has outdone his father, Hafez Assad, in terms of murderousness and brutality. The eye doctor from Damascus is responsible not only for the murder of thousands of his own citizens, but also for the firing of thousands of missiles at Israel by his Hezbollah emissaries and allies.

I only wish bad things for Assad and his regime. The heart is outraged and the blood boils when one sees the images and hears the reports from Syria. Yet I do not think that the West should militarily intervene in what goes on there.

Had we known with certainty that such intervention would turn Syria into a peace-loving democracy, I would justify this move. However, experience has taught us that the West does not understand the Middle East, and that every time it tries to change Mideastern realities, it encounters negative surprises.

Thousands of American troops and Iraqi citizens were killed during the war initiated by the United States and its allies in order to topple Saddam Hussein and change the regime in Iraq. The outcome is still unclear. In Afghanistan too, the US became entangled in the longest war in its history. America will apparently withdraw from Afghanistan next year with its tail between its legs, as the Taliban retakes power.

Fiascos in Egypt, Libya

In Egypt, President Barack Obama openly supported the Tahrir Square revolution and prompted the detainment of President Hosni Mubarak, an American ally for 30 years who will apparently be replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood. In Libya, Western jets bombed Gaddafi’s forces, and there too it’s still unclear whether we got a democratic regime or an al-Qaeda government.

The intervention of the democratic-Christian-modern West in the lands of the Levant reminds me of development and modernization efforts that ignore nature. We dried up swamps, built dams, dug tunnels and diverted rivers – and only later discovered the damage we caused nature without intending or realizing it.

Despite our disgust with Assad and our great desire to immediately put an end to the massacre against his countrymen, we can assume that should the West dispatch military forces and intervene in Syria, this will only increase the bloodshed. Moreover the regime that will replace the secular tyrant will be a religious, Sunni tyranny that will be even worse. (Copyright 2012 © Yedioth Internet 05/29/12)