“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” said Mark Twain.


The war began in 1936 with an uprising in Morocco of Spanish Nationalists against a Madrid regime seen as anti-Catholic, Marxist, and Trotskyite. Vladimir Lenin had predicted that Spain would be the second Soviet republic in Europe.

The war would last three years, with Joseph Stalin providing aid to the regime, Benito Mussolini sending troops to fight on the side of Gen. Francisco Franco, and Adolf Hitler sending his Condor Legion. The bombing of Guernica by the Legion, commemorated in the famous Picasso painting of that name, would be regarded as the great war crime of the conflict.


In 1936, as the Spanish war erupted, FDR spoke for his country: “We shun commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars; we avoid connections with the political activities of the League of Nations. … We are not isolationists except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.”

America emphatically agreed.

Today, it is the bitter fruit of Iraq and Afghanistan that explains our reluctance. Then, it was 116,000 American dead in places like the Argonne and Belleau Wood–which had produced a Carthaginian peace at Versailles and set the table for Hitler–that had left us with ashes in our mouths.

Two battalions of American volunteers did go to Spain to fight on the side of the regime. In 1947, veterans of that “Abraham Lincoln Brigade” would be put on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.

In Spain, the struggle was ideological and religious–nationalists and Catholics against socialists, communists, and anarchists.

In Syria, too, it is religious–the Alawite Shia regime of Bashar Assad battling an uprising centered in the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.

As Europe in 1936 contained democracies, dictatorships of the fascist and authoritarian right, and a Stalinist left, today’s Middle East contains democracies, monarchies, and dictatorships.

As there were Catalans and Basques fighting for their own causes in Spain, in Syria today are Kurds, Druze, and al-Qaida with their own rival agendas.





A second danger is that as Syria contains Sunni, Shia, Druze, Kurd, Arab, Christian–indeed, mirrors the Middle East–a Syrian civil war could become a proxy war for all in the region, beginning with Lebanon.




Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of TAC and the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?“ Copyright 2012 Creators.com