Back into the falafel-frying pan

Reader, you are cowed.

Your head is bowed. Your legs quiver and shake like reeds in the wind. And your eyes turn shifty over your shoulder with every halting step.

Citizen of the United States of America, you are no longer invincible. Bearded jihadis stalk you, ululating in the night; stocky, brown-skinned individuals mount a slow and steady assault on your job security; the 1.7-billion-strong Red Chinese Menace grows fatter, lazier and more automobile-dependent. In 10 years’ time they will surpass America in every metric of the human development index. They’ve already tied us in the number of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises they have.

But national fast-food preeminence is your least concern.

Worse is your running streak of battlefield defeats. Twice in the past decade you have lent the lives of your young men and women and heaps of your tax dollars in support of ill-considered military misadventures. You are running scared: American troops have vacated Iraq and are making their way to the door in Afghanistan.

Now, a limp-wristed, let’s-all-talk-it-out-and-be-friends dovishness afflicts our nation’s foreign policy. Today’s American military leadership—bereft of such carnivorous men’s-men as former U.S. Army Gen. Stanley “Four-Hours-of-Sleep-and-One-Meal-a-Day” McChrystal—is most notable for puerile sex scandals.

Our president goes to a place like the repressive ex-military oligarchy of Burma and compliments its leaders’ faddish turn toward democratic government. New U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel believes that the Israelis and Palestinians should resolve their differences peaceably instead of blowing each other up every 18 months.

Utter madness.

And the best that Secretary of State John Kerry can do for Syria’s rebel army is to ship over some night-vision goggles and cans of fruit cocktail.

Americans, we can do better. It’s time to man up and resume resolving the world’s problems through brute force of arms.

We may start with Syria, where the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, which has claimed more than 70,000 lives, now drags into a third year.

International actors in the West and the Middle East alike support a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, but they’ve been consistently stonewalled by masculine Russian and Chinese realpolitik on the U.N. Security Council. And though the rebels’ recent successes have left Assad’s army reeling, the conflict is far from over.

The U.S. can no longer sit idly by and watch its regional strategic interests deteriorate. The Syrian anarchy further destabilizes a region rocked by instability in Iraq, Egypt and Libya. And Assad’s presence strengthens our old bugbear Iran, which leans on the dictator to funnel arms and money to the Lebanese anti-Israeli militia group Hezbollah.

But no more Mr. Nice Lone-Remaining-Superpower.

It’s time for another Libya-style massive aerial show-of-force ass-kicking. Then surgical strikes by SEAL Team 6. Followed by tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, mobile artillery and the general U.S. military occupation of Syria.

The U.S. needs another endless military quagmire of the likes of Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan to prolong its status as international top dog, and a long-term neocolonial gambit in Syria should fit the bill nicely. In spite of these ventures’ high cost in blood, cash and toil, they hammer home certain points with unique efficacy.

Your backyard is also America’s backyard. And your natural resources are also America’s natural resources.

There is the matter of manufacturing the appropriate excuse for invasion. But how hard has that ever been? Massacring civilians? There’s the door, sir. Harboring terrorist organizations? Allow me to introduce my good friend, the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone. Occupy a strategic stretch of petroleum-rich desert waste? Here’s a free ticket to a decade of internecine civilian slaughter!

Only the creative destruction of a humiliating military occupation can help America cow the world into accepting us as their righteous and benevolent overlords.

Four years of nice-guy foreign policy have been eminently sane and productive. But the U.S. is no longer enough of a sinewy international intimidator to rely on good sense and cooperation. If America can’t once again prove its canines-bared, bloodshot-eyed mettle to the Syrian, then we haven’t a shot against the Chinese.

And even though the Colonel’s got the MSG down, this columnist rues the day that oyster sauce gets into his secret recipe.