Damascus, Syria -- In the New Testament, Saul of Tarsus found Jesus on the road to Damascus. Alas, I made no such profound discovery.

What I saw, traveling along the Nassib road into this capital city, was not heaven, but a thick layer of smog. This city of 4.5 million sits in a valley, and a gray haze sits on top of it, kind of like Los Angeles, circa 1970.

So if the U.S. military invades Syria to force "regime change," it will need hazardous-duty pay, not only for the fighting but for the breathing. Yet as I consider that prospect, it's hard for me take seriously the notion that such an invasion can be justified as "self-defense," as the United States claimed in regard to Iraq. This country is struggling to get out of the 1970s, not only in terms of environmental public health but also in terms of politics, economics and the military.

A half century ago, many thought that Syria had a bright future under socialism. Now we know that the result was stagnation. Still, even three decades ago, Syria, like its patron, the Soviet Union, seemed to be a player, thanks to its war-fighting arsenal.

Today, it's apparent that a robust military depends upon a robust economy and the new technology that wealth generates. Post-Soviet Russia can barely subdue breakaway Chechnya; similarly, the Syrians, long in the thrall of the USSR, have a hollow armed force.

In other words, the Syrians have little. And they know it -- one asset they do possess is the perspective that comes from 7,000 years of civilization beneath their feet. When I met with Mahdi Dahlala, editor of the government-run newspaper Al-Ba'ath (Reconstruction), I apologized for not speaking Arabic. He answered, in English, "It's OK, you don't have to. It's your turn now." What he meant is it's the era of English, the time in history when the Americans and the British rule the world. And others, including the Syrians, must adapt.

But if all the Syrians I met with understand the need to make changes in the name of modernization, many matters appear non-negotiable. This is an authoritarian, personality-cult country. Pictures of President Bashar Al-Assad are everywhere. Dahlala is the only newspaper editor I've ever met who keeps a huge portrait of his country's leader over his desk. But then there aren't many newspapers -- at least not in the West -- that are housed in the headquarters building of the Ministry of Information.

Indeed, for a newsman, Dahlala is Soviet-like in his vigorous defense of the status quo. Asked about any criticisms of the Damascus government that his paper might have printed, he cited an investigation of a dam failure, in which bureaucrats were zinged in his pages for incompetence. Of course, that's not the same as zinging the system itself.

In fact, fundamental critiques of Syria's undemocratic system do not appear to be on Dahlala's agenda at all. Questioned about state torture -- Syria is ranked at or near the bottom of human-rights rankings -- Dahlala gave a shrug: "It's a problem." A problem, it seemed, sort of like the weather -- more to be observed than acted upon. When I handed him a list of 13 names of Syrians imprisoned for thought crimes, given to me by Farid Ghadry, a Syrian exile now living in the United States, Dahlala looked at me and said, "Only 13?" That was pretty cynical of him, I thought. He went on to accuse Ghadry of being a CIA front man. For the record, Ghadry, who has established the Reform Party of Syria to push for democracy, denies any U.S. government connection.

But if Dahlala had little to say about Syria's faults, he had a lot to say about the failings of other countries, notably Israel and the United States. For him, the No. 1 foreign policy issue is the return of the Golan Heights, a 500-square-mile area that Syria lost to Israel in the 1967 War. "All Syrians think that Israel is their enemy," he said, adding that Washington is "controlled by the Zionist lobby." And, in fact, just about all the Syrians I met -- from patrons interviewed at random in a coffee shop in the Old City to vendors at the souk to students at Damascus University -- seemed united in similar views. In other words, true democracy would undoubtedly bring many benefits to Syria, but the country's foreign policy might not change much.

Of course, absent free elections, there's no way to know for sure what Syrians think. At Damascus U., as I stood amid a crowd of students eager to chat with me and two other American reporters, one student sidled up to me and whispered, in extremely broken English, that all Arab governments are ... the word he was saying came out as "telerist." I couldn't figure out if he was trying to say "terrorist" or "tolerant."

There's a big difference, so I asked the student to say it again. He was clearly struggling with three concerns: First, to be heard. Second, to be heard in English. Third, to not be overheard by the Syrian government translator, preoccupied with other conversations just a few feet away. Finally, he uttered a different word, one of the few in Arabic I know: "Harb." Which means "war." As in, the Arab governments are about war. Did the student mean to say that Arab regimes are about war with Israel? With the United States? Or all of the above? I couldn't tell, but I got the point: war.

American neoconservatives, so influential in the Bush administration, seem bent on harb, too. John Bolton, undersecretary of state, regularly accuses the Syrians of building weapons of mass destruction and the missile systems to deliver them. The last time Americans heard such talk, of course, was during the run-up to the Iraq war. Saddam Hussein was all about war, but now, eight months after the United States attacked, we know the Iraqis had no capacity to damage us. Still, thanks to the erroneous -- and perhaps deliberately mendacious -- "intelligence reports" of Bolton & Co., the United States finds itself in the middle of a costly guerilla harb in Iraq.

The Syrian regime may be a bunch of nogoodniks, but there are a lot of those around the world -- some of them routinely toasted and feted by President George W. Bush. But if the Syrians don't pose a threat to the United States, then Uncle Sam ought not to be launching a harb against yet another Arab country.