Shadi Hamid counters seven of what the title of his article refers to as “fallacies on Syria.” These are supposed to be the “most common” anti-interventionist arguments, but to the best of my knowledge most opponents of intervention against the Syrian government don’t use some of them at all and use others that aren’t listed here more frequently.

For instance, Hamid tells us that “not everything is Iraq,” by which he means that not all interventions are “Iraq-style invasion[s].” This is obviously true, but somewhat beside the point. Critics of proposed “no-fly” and safe zones have identified the serious flaws in those proposals without having to talk about an Iraq-style invasion. The dangers in creating “no-fly” and safe zones are different from the dangers involved in overthrowing a regime, but they are still significant and unacceptable. No doubt the same critics would also oppose a large-scale Iraq-style invasion of Syria, but it is widely understood that virtually no one has been arguing for anything like that. In that sense, even most Syria hawks understand that the public has no appetite for such a major commitment and there is no political will to do something on that scale. That doesn’t mean that “no-fly” and safe zones make sense or are worth the considerable risks and costs associated with them (especially since those potential costs have increased dramatically in the wake of direct Russian intervention in the war). The bad proposals that Syria hawks have put forward are quite bad enough on their own. And a proposed intervention can still be a horrible idea even if it is not as bad as the ideas that led to the Iraq war.

The Iraq war should show us the danger of waging a war of choice in a country that we poorly understand and don’t know how to stabilize at an acceptable cost. It should teach us that our government is much better at destabilizing a country and exacerbating its problems than it is at doing the opposite, and it suggests that our government may not be capable of addressing even the country’s most basic security needs. It should always be a reminder that the costs of intervention are higher, the duration longer, and the unintended consequences worse than most people on both sides of the debate thought possible. That experience should make us wary of arguments for military action that don’t address the possible negative consequences of “action.” Regardless, the case for intervening in Syria would still be unpersuasive even if the Iraq war had never happened.

Hamid objects that it is unrealistic to expect that interventionists can prove that their preferred policies would produce better outcomes. Of course, no one can know for certain what the consequences of a given policy will be, but the problem with existing interventionist proposals for Syria is that they have such a low likelihood of success on their own terms. Creating safe zones, for example, would require tens of thousands of soldiers deployed in dangerous conditions for many years. When Syria hawks have been pressed to be specific about who will provide the soldiers to do this, there is often a lot of hand-waving about an imaginary “Sunni army” that will supposedly do most of the work. It is very likely that the U.S. would be the one stuck with the task of creating and defending these zones. If not properly protected, those zones would just become easy targets for attacks on civilians, and even if they were successful it would mean a substantial, open-ended commitment during which time the forces deployed there would be targets for attacks from jihadists and others.

Hamid says that “we must be willing to judge the consequences of non-intervention,” but non-intervention isn’t what U.S. policy has been. The U.S. could have avoided any involvement, but opted fairly early on to lend support to at least certain parts of the opposition. Our policy has been to provide weapons and training to some of the armed groups in the war, and many other states have been doing the same. Syria is such a nightmarish conflict in part because so many outside governments are helping to fuel it.

Perhaps if there had not been so many governments trying to meddle in the conflict we could talk about “the consequences of non-intervention,” but that isn’t what happened. We can’t say that a “do no harm” approach has resulted in great harm because the U.S., its allies, and many of its regional clients have been in favor of trying to do plenty of harm on the cheap by backing their proxies in the war. The hawkish argument is that the situation would be made better if the U.S. involved itself more deeply and directly in the conflict, but that ignores that other actors would respond to our escalation with their own and it ignores that outside intervention tends to prolong and intensify these conflicts rather than help bring them to an end.

One common objection to the interventionist case is that the U.S. has no right or authority to do what Syria hawks want to do. In the absence of U.N. authorization, the U.S. cannot legally use force against another government except in self-defense. That holds true whether our government intends to overthrow the other regime or not. That is another objection to which I have yet to see a convincing response.

Oddly, one of the most common refrains from opponents of intervention in Syria is not on Hamid’s list and goes unaddressed. This is the standard objection that I and many others make all the time: the U.S. has little or nothing at stake in the conflict in Syria. There are many flaws in the case for intervening in Syria, but its big and probably fatal weakness is that advocates of intervention can’t explain why it is in the interests of the U.S. to attack a government when it doesn’t threaten us or our allies. Trump claimed that “vital U.S. interests” were at stake when he ordered the attack last week, but this is obviously untrue unless one broadens the definition of “vital interests” so much that the phrase becomes meaningless. In short, interventionists don’t have an answer to the basic questions of “why?” and “why us?” that would satisfy anyone that didn’t already agree with them from the start, and that hasn’t changed in six years.