Gerson's delusional approach to Syria

Reading Michael Gerson's opinion of Sept. 10, I thought time had gone backward to the U.S. failed invasion of Iraq and the accumulated destruction that had occurred in the country by 2007. By that time, the U.S. had incurred 5,000 dead, spent $1 trillion, saw millions of Iraqi refugees and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.

Now Mr. Gerson believes that the U.S. should have sent military forces to Syria in order to prevent the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to Europe and to end the atrocities of the Assad regime. That somehow an incursion of U.S. ground troops into Syria was going to have an outcome different from the disaster we suffered in Iraq is an incredible delusion.

The world should be thankful that President Obama and Putin were able together to remove chemical weapons from Assad's arsenal. If those weapons of mass destruction had not been removed by that praise worthy action, we would be seeing millions of Syrian dead. However, U.S. ground troops, military training of the Assad opposition or supplying Humvees and weapons to them, as we did to the Shiites in Iraq, will not solve the crisis in Syria.

Tom Teune

Wheaton