On Andrea Tantaros’ radio show on Friday, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan warned against taking military action in Syria, especially without knowing a lot of the facts on the ground.
“There is a natural healthy reluctance to launch a new war based on an incident, which appears to be the use of some kind of chemical weapon,” Buchanan said. “We don’t know who ordered it. We don’t know how it was delivered. We don’t know whether it was chlorine or serine. We have no idea or we have not gotten proof as far as I’ve seen that [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad ordered this done. And the idea that we would launch unilaterally a war against a country that has not attacked us or threatened us without the authorization of the Congress, which has the power to declare war — it seems to me is an act of almost insanity.”
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Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” explained what he thought could be the reasoning for the rush to attack the Syrian regime by neoconservatives, which he called “the backdoor to war with Iran.”
“The neocons realize that if they can get us to attack Syria and there’s a real possibility that there will be retaliatory attacks on Americans or attacks on Israel which will then cause the Israelis or the Americans to attack Syria’s allies in Iran — Syria is the backdoor to war with Iran,” Buchanan said. “That’s been the objective of the neocons down the road all along. With the new Iranian government, which looks like it is anxious to negotiate with the Americans for the simple reason it is really hurting under the sanctions and the new president, [Hassan] Rouhani was elected basically to lift the sanctions and bring Iran back into the community of nations and to establish a working relationship with the United States. I believe the real hidden motive here is to get the United States into Syria, into making war and this war will naturally spread, they feel, and we will end up with a war on Iran.”
He went on to say it was possible the chemical weapons attacks were a “false flag” operation, with the desire to draw the United States into the Syrian civil war because it would make little sense for Assad to draw the United States into a war he was winning.
Buchanan added the urgency of the administration to pull the trigger on strikes was a product of that being the case and if it were put to a vote of Congress, authorization to strike Syria could go by the wayside as it did in the British Parliament earlier this week.
“Now why is President Obama moving now?” Buchanan said. “There are two reasons. One, he has egg all over his face having foolishly run around and said ‘my red line will not be crossed and any chemical weapons used and I will act.’ He said that he doesn’t have the authority to attack a foreign country without the approval of Congress, but he went ahead and did it and they wanted to back out of it. Now you have got another incident here and people are saying, ‘Does Obama have the guts to step up by his word to not let them cross the red line?’”
“Second, I do think Obama is a man of the left and this idea that it’s not when American vital interest are threatened, but somehow their morality is upset, is that is when they order Americans to go to war,” he continued. “But there is no vital American interest in this war. There is no certitude in what happened here. And there is no authorization on the part of Congress. There is no declaration of war. If the president moves forward on this, I think he at least risks the utter ruination of his presidency.”
Tantaros closed the interview by asking Buchanan who would win a steel-cage match between he and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. Buchanan reminded Tantaros he was friends with Kristol’s father, Irving Kristol and that he had been a friend of his until they had a falling out over the first Gulf war during the George H.W. Bush presidency and the expansion of NATO. But, he added, he had been a boxer in his school years, implying he could win that match.