I still don’t find comparisons between Syria’s conflict the Spanish Civil War very persuasive, but I strongly endorse the rest of Andrew Doran’s argument and his conclusion:

To resist intervention in Syria is not to justify the crimes of the Assad regime. It is, rather, to acknowledge the reality of unintended consequences that have haunted America’s Middle East foreign policy for decades. It is to acknowledge that the United States has no business, in the words of Thomas Macaulay, “busying ourselves about matters which we do not understand and cannot efficiently control.”

I would add that even if we did fully understand the conflict in Syria, Americans have to recognize the inability of the U.S. to control and “shape” events in the way that interventionists pretend that we can. The arrogance and presumption that the U.S. can exercise effective control over the course of events in other countries whose political divisions we superficially understand are on full display in this statement from Walter Russell Mead:

Regular readers of this blog know that we’ve seen that the radicalization of the region and the spread of sectarian war were the likeliest consequences of the refusal of the White House to act earlier to bring the conflict to a close [bold mine-DL] and that as time went by, the danger of the conflict would rise and the options to the US would get worse and worse.

According to this, there was something that the U.S. could have done in the past two years that could have brought the Syrian conflict to a “close,” but that it refused to do this. In other words, willpower is what makes all the difference. It would be charitable to call this naive, but Mead isn’t naive. It’s almost impossible for anyone to be as furious with Obama over both Libya and Syria as Mead is, but Mead pulls it off because he simply defends the opposite of whatever the administration happens to be doing at the time. It’s completely incoherent to view the Libyan war as a terrible blunder (which it was) and then insist that Obama should have made the even greater blunder of plunging the U.S. into Syria’s civil war, but that is what Mead has been doing for quite a while.

The truth is that the conflict in Syria would not have been brought to a “close” if the U.S. had intervened earlier and more forcefully. The U.S. would instead be a party to the conflict to one degree or another, which would almost certainly still be going on, but it would continue with the added difference that the U.S. and its allies would have escalated it into an international war with all of the destabilizing effects that go with it. We can’t know how Iran and other states would have responded to this, but it is absurd to think that it would have made Assad’s patrons less likely to arm and supply his forces. U.S. intervention would not have dissuaded Assad’s patrons from continuing to back him, which they were going to do no matter what the U.S. did, but would have allowed them to portray their support for the regime as an effort to resist Western interventionist policies. It is also possible that Assad’s supporters would have widened the conflict by striking out at other U.S. clients and allies in retaliation. All of the harmful consequences that the Syrian conflict has had on the surrounding region would have been made more likely and probably would have happened even sooner than they have. Jihadists around the world would treat U.S. intervention as a new pretext for attacks on Western targets, and would use it as a recruiting tool. Very few other states would have supported the U.S. in military intervention, which would have been illegal, and the U.S. would “own” the aftermath of the conflict to such an extent that the U.S. would be and would be held to be responsible for subsequent chaos and disorder. The insane thing about Mead’s position is that he already holds the U.S. responsible for events over which Washington has little or no control.

Mead takes this position to vindicate the assumption that “on the whole there is less risk, less cost and less bloodshed when the US takes an active role in maintaining order and peace overseas in key theaters than when it sits on its hands.” Of course, all of this depends on what one means by an “active role.” Maintaining order and peace isn’t compatible with starting unnecessary wars, and there’s no way that it could be.