Jennifer Rubin is disappointed:

And Cameron was no better, declaring: ““What is being done in Homs .?.?. is simply appalling and shouldn’t be allowed to stand in our world.” But it will, because neither he nor his basketball buddy are willing to exert leadership to do something about it.

This may not matter much, but is it possible for interventionists to avoid such absurd euphemisms when they refer to escalating the conflict in Syria with arms shipments or possibly even starting a war against the Syrian government? If Obama and Cameron decided to intervene in Syria, they wouldn’t be “exerting leadership.” At a minimum, they would be providing support to one side in a civil war in the hopes that making the civil war last longer than it otherwise would might result in the collapse of the current government. In an extreme case, they would be giving orders to wage a war of dubious legality that would most likely result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people (and that’s just counting the casualties that the U.S. and U.K. might cause among pro-regime forces and civilians). When interventionists are calling for “action” or “leadership,” they are demanding that the U.S. government fuel an ongoing conflict for the purpose of toppling a foreign government or they are sometimes demanding (as McCain et al. have done) that the government use force to engage in large-scale killing of many people.

It is very unfortunate that our policy debate is always so tilted in favor of military action and meddling in other nations’ conflicts that we’re supposed to think it is wrong to do the prudent and morally responsible thing by refusing to make a conflict far worse than it is.