President Barack Obama

If Assad’s chemical weapons threaten any nation, it is Israel. But Israel knows where they are stored and has an air force superior to our own in the Med. Israeli troops on the Golan are as close to Damascus as Dulles Airport is to Washington, D.C. Yet Israel has not attacked Syria’s chemical weapons.

Why not? Israel is well aware that Syria’s air defense system is, as The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, “one of the most advanced and concentrated barriers on the planet.”

And if Israel does not feel sufficiently threatened by Syria’s chemical weapons to go after them, why should we, 4,000 miles away?

Then there is Turkey, with three times Syria’s population, NATO’s second-largest army and a 600-mile border. Why is ridding the Middle East of Assad our assignment and not Ankara’s?

Surely the heirs of the Ottomans have a larger stake here.

And if we get into this war, how do we get out?

For the war is metastasizing. Hezbollah is sending in fighters to help the Alawite Shia. Other Lebanese are assisting the Sunni rebels. The war could spread into Iraq, where the latest clashes between Sunni and Shia are pulling the country apart. Young Muslims are coming in from Europe.

Iran and Russia are aiding Damascus. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are aiding the Islamists. The United States, Jordan and Turkey are aiding the secularists. Syria could come apart, and a sectarian and ethnic war of all against all erupt across the region.

Do we really want the U.S. military in the middle of this?

Because his “red line” appears to have been crossed, Obama is being told he must attack Syria to maintain his credibility with Iran and North Korea.

Nonsense. To attack Syria would compound Obama’s folly in drawing the red line. Better to have egg on Obama’s face than for America to be dragged into another unnecessary war.

Obama would not be alone in having his bluff called. George Bush proclaimed that no “axis of evil” nation would be allowed to acquire the “world’s worst weapons.” North Korea now has those weapons.

Congressional war hawks, led by Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are cawing for air strikes and no-fly zones, which would mean dead and captured Americans and many more dead Syrians.

Time for Congress to either authorize Obama to lead us into a new Middle East war, or direct him, in the absence of an attack upon us, to keep America out of what is Syria’s civil war.

Before we slide into another war, let the country be consulted first.