“waves of Egyptians” are pouring into Syria to join the fight against the Assad regime and its allies, Hezbollah and Iran. The Egyptians in question are “fired by the virulently sectarian rhetoric of Sunni preachers” who are “call[ing] for jihad.” In other words, the Egyptians pouring into Syria are Islamic jihadists.

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we have no vital interests in the outcome of Syria’s civil war. Both sides are our enemies. Assad has neither attacked nor threatened to attack the United States. Consequently, waging war against the Syrian regime is wholly a matter of choice. That is a choice that, in our constitutional system, cries out for congressional authorization. Without congressional authorization – without a demonstration that the American people’s representatives are satisfied that American interests call for waging an unprovoked war against the Assad regime – there should be no American intervention.

Thanks to Republican Senators Rand Paul (of Kentucky) and Mike Lee (of Utah), we might finally get on Syria what we were denied on Libya: a real debate among the American people’s representatives over congressional authorization of President Obama’s unilateral war-making in the Middle East.

The Washington Examiner reports that Senators Paul and Lee have joined with two counterparts, Democrats Chris Murphy (of Connecticut) and Tom Udall (of New Mexico), in offering legislation that would block direct or indirect aid for military or paramilitary operations in Syria. The bill, which is posted on Paul’s website, is called the “Protecting Americans from the Proliferation of Weapons to Terrorists Act of 2013.”

The proposal would not affect or prohibit humanitarian aid, but it forthrightly addresses the issue Syria intervention supporters willfully ignore: the factions President Obama is abetting – egged on by the GOP’s McCain wing and their fellow transnational progressives on the Democratic side of the aisle – are Islamic supremacists dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and closely connected to violent jihadists, including al Qaeda-affiliated groups.

As John Rosenthal acutely observes in his short but essential book The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion, while there are many problems with using the label “war on terror” to describe our ongoing hostilities, “at least the term had the advantage of making clear that the US and its allies abhorred the tactic in question.” Yet, in Libya, and now in Syria, we have turned a blind eye to the fact that terrorism is used by the jihadists our government has chosen to side with. We try to obscure this fact by referring to the opposition forces as “rebels,” the better to avoid noticing that they consider themselves mujahideen (jihad warriors), and by pretending we favor only the “secular” “moderates,” though it is laughable to suggest there are enough of them to topple the regimes in question without allying with the more numerous and formidable Islamic-supremacists factions.

This is a disgraceful state of affairs. For many years after their enactment in 1996, the material-support-to-terrorism laws, which prohibit and severely punish any abetting of terrorist organizations and their savage methods, were foundational to American counterterrorism. They have been a staple of anti-terrorism prosecutions and of the policy shift designed to prevent terrorist attacks from happening (by starving jihadist cells of resources) rather than content ourselves to prosecute only after suffering attacks. At least as importantly, material support statutes also proclaimed our moral position: any organization that resorted to terrorism is the enemy of humanity, regardless of its cause and regardless of what humanitarian activities the organization purports to carry out. Now, no matter how much government officials deny it, our government is endorsing what we went to war to defeat. Our government is materially supporting terrorists – the very conduct it prosecutes and imprisons American citizens for committing.

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The demonstrators maintain Morsi has become a power-hungry autocrat who is intent on making the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt’s permanent ruling party.

They also blame the Obama administration and U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson for propping up Morsi and facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood’s power grab.

“We are very critical of the Obama administration because they have been supporting the Brotherhood like no one has ever supported them,” Shadi Al Ghazali Harb, a 24-year-old member of Egypt’s Revolutionary Youth Coalition, told the Washington Free Beacon on Friday afternoon during a telephone interview from Cairo.

The White House is “the main supporter of the Brotherhood,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the American support this president would have fallen months ago.”

Al Ghazali Harb specifically dubbed Patterson “the first enemy of the revolution,” claiming “she is hated even more than Morsi.”

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Fouad predicted that if Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood survives these protests they will likely “survive anything.”

USA ambassador Paterson:

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Americans would do well to recall the sequence of events that led to Japan’s attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the Second World War. In 1941, the United States imposed a near-total embargo on oil shipments to Japan to punish its aggression on the Asian mainland. Unfortunately, Washington drastically underestimated how Japan would respond.
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COULD A U.S. response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine provoke a confrontation that leads to a U.S.-Russian war? Such a possibility seems almost inconceivable. But when judging something to be “inconceivable,” we should always remind ourselves that this is a statement not about what is possible in the world, but about what we can imagine.

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