Richard Cohen cannot help himself:

With a population of around 40 million, Britain lost some 900,000 men. It won, aside from victory, virtually nothing. The consequence was a pernicious pacifism, which cheered Hitler and infuriated Churchill.

Something like that is happening now [bold mine-DL]. The reaction to the Iraq war has produced a there-they-go-again-syndrome, so that a proposed humanitarian intervention is sneeringly dismissed as if the rallying cry is “on to Baghdad.”

There is something pernicious in our contemporary foreign policy debates, but it isn’t pacifism. Cohen has been an early and frequent advocate for a Syrian war, and more than most he has been intent on pretending that he isn’t really calling for starting a war, but that is exactly what he has been doing. The Iraq war was a terrible blunder and a massive crime, and Cohen supported it, but that is not the issue today. Iraq war advocates should have learned to be less eager to start unnecessary wars, but demanding that the U.S. go to war in Syria is misguided and wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with Iraq. One might think that a former Iraq war hawk would have a little bit of humility when calling for yet another war, but the argument for intervention in Syria fails all on its own. The problem with the arguments of Syria hawks isn’t just that they shouldn’t be heeded because almost all of them were wrong about Iraq, but also that they have obviously been wrong about what the U.S. should do in response to Syria’s conflict.

When it comes to Syria policy, some liberal hawks are still misapplying the lessons of what they think the interventions in the Balkans demonstrated. Cohen has been a serial offender in drawing the wrong lessons from Bosnia in particular. Syria hawks are keen to point out that “Syria is not Iraq,” which is not very meaningful for reasons I have discussed before, but some of them are happy to believe that Syria is this generation’s Bosnia. Indeed, Cohen has pretended that the Bosnian war was brought to an end by a few air strikes. For a certain generation of liberals and for internationalists more generally, intervention in Bosnia stands as the vindication of the activist impulse in foreign policy. Even though that impulse seems so thoroughly discredited by the last decade’s failures of activist foreign policy, Bosnia seems to offer liberal hawks the possibility that they haven’t been completely wrong on foreign policy for the last twenty years. Unfortunately for liberal Syria hawks, Syria isn’t Bosnia, and the desperate need to pretend that it is tells us more about the hawks’ need for vindication than it does about the realities of the current conflict.

Cohen complains that many of his fellow liberals are supposedly heartless because they oppose starting a war against Syria. This is a common argument of humanitarian interventionists, who resolutely avoid acknowledging that they are demanding for an escalation of the conflict with all of its attendant increases in death and destruction. Is Cohen a “bleeding-heart liberal” because he wants the U.S. government to start killing hundreds and thousands of people in another country’s civil war? That is not usually what people mean when they use that name. Because liberal interventionists claim to want to start a war for the right reasons, this supposedly eliminates their responsibility to account for how their proposed policy will achieve its goals without increasing the evils it is supposed to remedy. It doesn’t, and they shouldn’t be allowed to argue as if this were the case.