In the great game of guessing which nation will next feel the wrath of the American military, I tend to believe, though the all of the indicators are pointing against it, that Syria will be our next target and deservedly so. Barbara Lerner (who by the way Alex is from Chicago) writing for National Review Online, agrees. Some notable quotes:

Rumsfeld and others wanted to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime without first spending months telegraphing our punches in the U.N. That would have given us the advantage of surprise, making it much harder for Iraq’s Baathists and jihadis to set up bases in neighboring countries and transfer billions of dollars and large loads of unknown weapons and supplies there before the war. Key players in the State Department and the CIA opposed the invasion of Iraq altogether, and passionately opposed doing it without U.N. approval. Tony Blair was also passionate about the U.N., and President Bush split the difference. He gave the go-ahead for General Tommy Franks’s daring shock-and-awe offensive for the liberation of Iraq, but not before he gave the U.N. every chance to take effective action first. When it came to running Iraq in the interim between the liberation and a new, elected, and empowered Iraqi government, control of American policy once again reverted, for the most part, to State and CIA. Key players there favored a long, slow transition, a major effort to woo hostile elements in both the Shiite and Sunni communities, and a conciliatory stance toward Iraq’s predatory neighbors. Threats to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr with no follow-through; the aborted attack on the Iraqi terror-center of Fallujah in April 2004; and the long resistance to imposing sanctions on Syria: All these are examples of State-CIA policy in action. At Fallujah especially, our troops chafed under it. It was the site of the first gross, triumphant, in-your-face public lynching of American civilians, and our fighting men did not want to negotiate with the lynchers’ frontmen. They wanted to crush them, to send the life-saving message: If you butcher Americans, you die. Their orders, instead, were to withdraw. In all these instances and more, Rumsfeld differed with his colleagues at State and CIA, and with a clique of military officers who agreed with them.

An excellent rundown of the recent events in Iraq. Here is more, specific to Syria:

But perhaps the most important, least-recognized difference between Rumsfeld and his opponents has to do with our stance toward the countries that surround Iraq. Rumsfeld recognized, early on, that the terror war in Iraq is sustained by the critical support it gets from terror-sponsoring neighboring states, and he wanted to take offensive action against them, too. He focused especially on Iraq’s western neighbor, asking for approval to pursue terrorists across the border, into the heart of today’s terror network in Syria. Once again, major players at State and CIA were opposed, and they prevailed; we continued to fight what is, in fact, a regional war in one country only.

This is a fundamental question of what type of war President is Dubya going to be? If he lets the political fatigue in the air sap his will to press home his advantage then he will have missed an opportunity to crush our enemies when they are vulnerable, as the Syrians surely are.