I could play "name that country," but there's no point. The country is Syria.

Ah, Syria. Hostile toward Israel, but willing to "render" certain U.S. prisoners. A "modern" Arab nation--one whose reformist" leader is ordering troops to shoot unarmed civilians. Oh, the conundrums!

In truth, we have at least as much reason to be acting against the Syrian leadership as we do against the Libyan leadership. Or, to look at it my way, we have as much reason not to be acting in Syria as we have to not be acting in Libya.

I'm no isolationist, but civil wars are not fights we need to get into. Yes, the world would be better if Muammar Ghadafy and Bashar al-Assad were not heads of authoritarian regimes. Maybe. The folks in Egypt and Tunisia are finding out that democratic government isn't always the next step after a revolution. The instigators of the Russian revolution had definite democratic tendencies. Then Lenin and Trotsky and friends moved in and took charge of the chaos.

This recognition of history is the driving force behind our continuing presence in Afghanistan. Many people believe that the Taliban would eventually come back into power if we leave. That might well be true. But the United States is not the policeman of the world. In any case, the United States cannot afford to be the policeman of the world.

I've been reading up on the fall of the western Roman Empire. For more than a millennium, Christianity and excessive taxation have been put forth as the most popular reasons for the extinction of that ancient power. I don't know about the religion thing (the general thesis seems to be that Christianity turns men into, well, something that isn't quite men), but the taxation part seems backwards to me.

By the middle of the fifth century, when the Huns and the Visigoths and Vandals and plenty more were harassing "greater Rome," taxes were very high. Taxes were very high because about half of the empire's budget went to the military. That meant much less money for aqueducts, roads, public buildings and other infrastructure that helped make the Roman world truly "Roman." The western Empire fell when a "barbarian" king took the reins of power and refused to serve as emperor, allowing many other groups to divide up the old "empire". In a relatively short period of time, Latin morphed into a series of dialects (later to become separate languages) and most of those physical hallmarks of Roman "civilization" slowly fell into ruin.

Of course, today's world remains, essentially, Roman. The preferred mode of government is some sort of democracy (something the Romans abandoned some five centuries before the demise of the empire), but the architecture of the bureaucracy created to sustain the Roman state is recognizable in most governments today. Tax collection systems, health and welfare programs (Roman soldiers had pensions, after all), differentiated local and federal governments, etc. To say the Roman Empire disappeared isn't quite right. It just faded into the background while the world kept spinning.

That will happen to the United States someday. World powers don't remain powers forever, though our demise is a ways off in the future. But if you've been to Europe and wandered through England or France or Spain or Germany or Italy, you'll find that demise isn't the worst thing in the world. There's a loss of general earnestness, I suppose, and a modestly lower standard of living as well. But most Americans could live like Europeans without much difficulty.

America will fall. That is the judgment of history. But one more judgment is this: America will fall much more quickly if it tries to rule the world by force.

Which is why we probably shouldn't be in Syria. Or Libya. Or Afghanistan. Or Iraq. We should have a strong military that can respond quickly to threats. But the costs of occupation are far too high for us to bear. And the costs of government building are too astronomical to even consider.

Jon Worley finds that occupying his house is pretty damned expensive, too.