From bad to worse
There’s a difference between bad and worse. To me, Sonny’s historical perspective reads like: Gaza was a hellhole, anyway, so why not bring Hamas to power? The Iranians have been trying to build nukes for 30 years, so why not invade Iraq and provide them an object lesson in why they need one sooner rather than later? Working with dictators isn’t bringing about heaven on earth, so let’s refuse to work with any undemocratic government (and any democratic one we don’t like). The al-Qaeda cell that hit us on 9/11 was headquartered in Hamburg, and al-Qaeda operates below the radar in dozens of other states — which is just the point, it’s a non-state group. Should we attack every state where we find an al-Qaeda cell?
As the Bush administration has illustrated with uncommon clarity in recent years, there’s an important rule in international relations: things can always get worse. We’re presuming that the situation with Syria can’t get any worse than it is, and that’s dangerous. When the hard line always looks good to you, chances are you’re exaggerating the severity of the threat you face, and overreacting to it. When you invade a country whose neighbors have understandable reasons to want your occupation to fail, you’ll naturally find reasons to widen the war. Well, how wide is wide enough? The whole Islamic world, or something less than the whole Islamic world? At what point does the maximalist rhetoric stop?
There’s a big difference between violating Afghanistan’s sovereignty to go after al-Qaeda in 2000 or 2001, after it had already attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 [EDITED IN RESPONSE TO SONNY’S POST], our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the U.S.S. Cole, and attacking Syria, which is at best incidental to the war. In my view, absent additional information we’re not aware of, a couple terrorists more or less on the Syrian frontier is not worth the likely costs of the action. If you honestly believe, on the basis of available evidence, that the benefits of this strike in terms of American lives will be greater than it costs down the line, I’ve got no problem with that. I just don’t know how you’re reaching that conclusion.
It’s acceptable to violate another country’s sovereignty when doing so will accomplish a significant objective that can’t be reached any better way. If we had a good shot of killing Osama bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Jalaluddin Haqqani, or a group of key terrorist figures, I’d have no problem with it. But these days, it seems patently absurd to start skirmishes on the Syrian border when the Iraqi ministries of defense and interior are already all but run from Tehran, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it, because we created the vacuum they’ve filled. And when you’re fighting a diffuse terrorist network like al-Qaeda, creating vacuums…sucks.