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Syria Hawks and “Humanitarian” Intervention

Richard Cohen is not yet exhausted despite three years of incessant warmongering: The left and the right embrace each other in the fervor of isolationism, confusing a humanitarian intervention with efforts by 19th-century Yanquis to make Central America safe for the United Fruit Co. This is deranged. Whatever else a military intervention in Syria would […]

Richard Cohen is not yet exhausted despite three years of incessant warmongering:

The left and the right embrace each other in the fervor of isolationism, confusing a humanitarian intervention with efforts by 19th-century Yanquis to make Central America safe for the United Fruit Co.

This is deranged. Whatever else a military intervention in Syria would have been, it would not have been humanitarian in its effects. Even a reasonably successful intervention aimed at deposing Assad would have added significantly to the death toll, intensified and broadened the conflict, might have made the country even more chaotic and lawless than it already is, and likely would have committed the U.S. to years if not decades of post-conflict work in rebuilding the country that we had helped to break. Let’s understand that the goal of the intervention that Cohen wanted and still wants would have led to regime collapse if it had “worked,” and that would have made the severe refugee and humanitarian crises in the region even worse than they are now. It is fitting that Cohen ends his column by becoming a caricature of a hawkish intervention by pleading that the Obama administration “do something!” That is, the U.S. needs to start killing people, or help others to kill them. This is how mindless the pro-intervention argument on Syria has always been, and that is one reason why it has been rejected by most Americans.

Since there have been few recent U.S. military interventions that can even be described as successes, we cannot reasonably assume that an armed intervention in Syria would have been successful even after many years, and there is no chance that the public would have tolerated a multi-year intervention in a foreign civil war. The U.S. had more than 100,000 soldiers in Iraq for more than half a decade, and no one except for pro-war dead-enders would argue that the effort was anything other than a colossal waste and a horrible mistake. Why should we assume that U.S. involvement in Syria’s war would have gone any better? In some ways, the “humanitarian” intervention that Cohen wants is worse than the abuse of U.S. military power overseas to secure corporate interests in the early 20th century. It promises something that it typically fails to deliver, and it serves as a pretext for interfering in foreign conflicts in a way that tends to make matters worse and prolongs the conflict. It makes ending human suffering into its justification, but in practice just adds to it and inflict it on different targets.

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