Killing to Save in Syria: When Liberalism is Lethal
In the debate on Syria, progressive pundits are letting us know that do-gooders can’t be peaceniks. Recently, pro-war commentators on liberal media outlets have greatly outnumbered the doves, with MSNBC leading the way. These humanitarian interventionists understand what the most famous progressives of all time made clear, that the obligation to rescue the unfortunate comes with an obligation to kill. What they don’t understand or willfully ignore is the lesson of history, which is that when the United States has taken on the responsibility for the well-being of humanity, it has destroyed far more lives than it has saved.
Last week on MSNBC’s All In, Chris Hayes featured a host of left-of-center hawks, including Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Julia Ioffe of The New Republic, Iraqi-American writer Zainab Salbi, who called for a “long-term intervention,” Mouaz Moustafa, a representative of the Syrian rebels, and Tom Perriello of the Center for American Progress, who has argued elsewhere not just for missile strikes against Assad but for “a more aggressive posture that would potentially include regime transition.” On his show, Chris Matthews justified bombing the Assad regime by declaring that even “Hitler didn’t use” chemical weapons. The liberal network’s call to war climaxed with a stunning piece of demagoguery on Wednesday’s Last Word, when reporter Richard Engel put a 10-year-old Syrian refugee girl on camera to say, “Does [Obama] want his kids to be like us? … When we get bigger, we’re going to write, ‘Obama didn’t help us.’”
Like many liberals who are asked to explain why Syria will be a good war if Iraq was a bad one, Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker wrote, “This time it’s different… What can America do? It’s not unreasonable to ask whether even a well-intentioned American effort to save Syrians might fail, or whether such an effort might pull America into a terrible quagmire…. But how much longer are we going to allow those questions to prevent us from trying?”
