Plan would perpetuate unrest in Mideast

I respond to the Associated Press article “Senate approves plan to train rebels” in the Sept. 19 Dispatch. I wish to commend Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio for voting against President Barack Obama’s proposal to train the rebels in Syria, and chastise Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, for voting for it.

Approval of this plan ensures that Obama’s successor will inherit the same Mideast problems that Obama did.

It is a sad state of affairs when about the only issue that the majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress can agree on is to continue the failed policies of aggression in the Mideast championed by President George W. Bush. Just as the IraqWar is now viewed as a major blunder by the majority of Americans, I suspect in time this will come to be viewed in the same way.

As ghastly and shocking as the beheading of western journalists was, it was just bait to draw the United States and other Western powers into a wider conflict that ultimately will play into the hands of the militant Islamists. And the president and Congress took it hook, line and sinker.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Violence never brings permanent peace, it solves no social problems, it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” That’s exactly what’s happened every time we have intervened in the Mideast.

I don’t always agree with the political cartoons of Dispatch Editorial Cartoonist Nate Beeler, but his depiction in Friday’s newspaper showing a gulf between Obama and Arab nations couldn’t be more accurate.

It is time for Islamic nations to step forward and take the lead in solving the rift among their various factions. No outside power, however strong, can do this for them. JOHN B. LOWE

Columbus