Beware the Do Something Caucus

The problem in Syria is that the opposition is no longer preferable to the regime and the regime is beyond redemption. Until I see evidence that contradicts it, I am not going to assume that Samantha Power is unaware of this conundrum just because she wrote a book condemning historical indifference to genocide in the West. The assumption is that she favors military action because she’s always argued that we should not stand idly by while evil regimes slaughter their own people. But all that tells us is that she is morally opposed to doing nothing when we can intervene at an “acceptable risk.” The problem in Syria is that there are no acceptable risks.

The one citation that Jeffrey Goldberg makes from Ms. Powers’ book that needs to be considered is the following:

So I have a sense that Power would believe that the following statement, which she made in her book’s concluding chapter, would apply to Syria: “When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk, it has a duty to act.”

In her conclusion, Power asks, “Why does the United States stand so idly by?” in the face of mass killing. And she explains the traditional behavior of Western leaders when confronted with proof of large-scale atrocities: “Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter. States that murder and torment their own citizens target citizens elsewhere. Their appetites become insatiable.”

Her argument for intervention in cases of large-scale violence against civilians is not motivated merely by moral interests: “Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.”

How does that apply to Syria? The regime has enlisted Lebanon’s Hizbollah, causing the civil war to spread to their neighbor, and the opposition has, indeed, become bad neighbors. Doing nothing has, as Ms. Powers predicted it would, failed to prevent a bad situation from getting worse.

But that doesn’t mean that some affirmative actions could have avoided this at an acceptable risk to the United States. Right now, we are not losing lives in Syria and we aren’t incurring huge costs there. Until someone explains how we can fix the problems there, I do not see why we should take ownership of the mother of all headaches.

The emerging “Do Something Caucus” needs to explain their plan.