Washington's Long History in Syria   Lee Kuan Yew has observed
that “it is the collective memory of a people, the composite
learning from past events which led to successes or disasters
that makes a people welcome or fear new events, because they
recognize parts in new events which have similarities with past
experience.” And in a region of the world where memories are
long and history matters, past events indicate that overtly
arming the Syrian rebels could amount to an even bigger kiss of
death.  Things were not always so bad between the United States
and Syria. Robert Kaplan’s 1995 book The Arabists describes an
Ottoman-ruled Syria where American Protestant missionaries
arrived in 1820, fifteen years before Washington opened a
consulate in Aleppo. These missionaries did not succeed in
converting many individuals to Christianity, but were
nonetheless loved for many other contributions, like the medical
treatment they brought to poor remote villages and their 1866
founding of what is now the American Univers