Charles Dunne of Freedom House wants the U.S. to take a “harder line” on Syria:

The fact is that the lack of U.S. action, especially compared with the energetic involvement of Iran and Hezbollah, amounts to an abdication of responsibility.

This certainly isn’t the first time that I’ve seen an interventionist frame the issue in terms of responsibility, but what advocates for “action” never make clear is why the U.S. has a responsibility to take sides in Syria’s conflict. Does America have a general responsibility to intervene in other countries’ civil wars? No, it doesn’t. Is America somehow uniquely responsible for providing support to embattled insurgencies? It doesn’t appear to be. Is it the responsibility of the U.S. government to facilitate regime change in another state when our countries are not at war? I can’t see how it could be. So what responsibility is the U.S. abdicating that it ought to be taking up instead? Invoking responsibility in this context is a lot like invoking “resolve” and “credibility” in these debates. On closer inspection, it doesn’t make any sense, but it lends rhetorical weight to a very weak policy argument.

Consider part of Dunne’s vision of what would happen following an Assad regime victory:

And don’t forget the impact on the Middle East “peace process”: a wounded Syria, on which so much depends, will be unable to negotiate a peace with Israel, and indeed may be tempted to intensify hostilities to gather credibility at home.

Finally, Iran will gain the upper hand in a shadow war with the Persian Gulf States and their ally, the United States. This is no small victory in a struggle for power in the region that has been going on since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Dunne doesn’t explain how Iran will gain an “upper hand” by shoring up the control of a weakened ally at enormous cost to itself and to Hizbullah in Lebanon. That scarcely counts as a victory. Every time in the last decade that hawks have thought that Iranian influence would be undermined by their preferred course of action, they have been wrong and Iranian influence has increased instead. Why should we now believe warnings that Iran will gain the “upper hand” if the U.S. refuses to be baited into fighting in Syria? It may be that a “wounded Syria” won’t be able to negotiate peace with Israel, but negotiations between the two had already been derailed back in 2008-09 by Operation Cast Lead, and it is foolish to think that a Syria dominated by the opposition would be more inclined to make peace with Israel.

The truth is that an outright Assad victory remains unlikely, and these scenarios are being drawn up to try to scare Americans into supporting a more aggressive Syria policy that isn’t required by U.S. interests.