Daniel Henninger conjures up some illusions of his own:

One year ago, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad began to methodically kill anyone publicly opposed to his rule. Like the criminal warlord Keyser Söze in “The Usual Suspects,” Assad is killing them, their wives, their children, their relatives, demolishing their homes and razing their towns. The world wants to help [bold mine-DL].

Evoking the Libyan intervention, the Obama administration says we can’t help, because we don’t have a U.N. Security Council resolution. Russia and China won’t let that happen. Our hands are tied. Syria is off the table.

Henninger’s illusion is that “the world wants to help,” as if that explained what the U.S. ought to do. This also implies that “the world” is in agreement on what to do, when that is far from being true. Most major governments are at a loss as to how to help, and most of the proposed “aid” wouldn’t help the Syrian people so much as get a lot more of them killed. The lack of U.N. authorization isn’t the only obstacle, but it’s not as if this is irrelevant. After all, it isn’t just Russia and China that are opposed to any course of action that violates Syrian sovereignty.

It’s true that there is a political element to the decision to stay out of Syria. There is very little support for intervening in Syria here in the U.S. The U.S. should not be plunging into a new conflict when the public is already exhausted by endless war, and it certainly shouldn’t do so when the public is overwhelmingly against greater involvement. If Obama pressed ahead with a policy decision on any other kind of issue that flagrantly ignored the preferences of at least 56% of the public to satisfy 19%, Henninger and his colleagues would be among the first to denounce him for “shoving” that policy down our throats. When it comes to starting new wars, Henninger has never seen one that he doesn’t want shoved down the public’s throat.