Syria

Yesterday Andrew Sullivan had That Sickening Feeling.

"And today’s media coverage felt like Iraq replayed as in a bad dream. The liberal internationalists, in an Ahmandownpour of self-righteousness, cannot wait to jump into another sectarian war we cannot control and would be unable to win. The neocons are still – staggeringly – being booked on television! Bret Stephens and Jennifer Rubin actually pulled out yet another Munich analogy  this week (seriously, it’s always Hitler with them) – only to be backed up by the blithering bore who is, alas, our current secretary of state."

The thing with Sullivan, I never understand his examples. For "liberal elites" he cites Anderson Cooper not having a guest opposed to the war. I'm not sure why he didn't look at Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes. If you're going to count news people as liberal elites, they're two I'd rank much higher than Anderson Cooper.

I do like this: "The United States would benefit by nothing more than accepting the fact that we do not have the power to control that region and shouldn’t die trying. Our credibility is threatened not when we stay out of other people’s civil wars, but when we make threats we cannot enforce."

He was writing before the Senate came up with a new draft that much limited the scope of the use of force. Andrew Rudalevige describes Syria Authorization 2.0.

Ezra Klein describes (with snark) the 12-dimensional chess interpretation of the Obama administration’s Syria strategy, The Obama administration’s brilliant strategy to keep us out of Syria.

Gotta like this summation: "The arguments were lengthy and unclear. The White House expressly admitted that their strikes wouldn’t save Syrian lives or topple Assad or making anything better in any way, and they were instead asking Americans to bomb Syria in order to enforce abstract international norms of warfare. It would be the first military action in American history that wasn’t meant to save lives or win a war but to slightly change the mix of arms a dictator was using to slaughter his population."

Later he wrote about The 10 most revealing moments in the Senate’s big Syria hearing.