I don’t think Mark Sumner is convincing at all. He declares that “ISIS represents no threat to the United States. None.” That’s a hard sell to the parents of American hostages still held by ISIS. I think what Sumner means is that ISIS doesn’t pose the kind of threat that al-Qaeda posed prior to 9/11. Even that is just argumentative. You can believe it; you can assert it. That doesn’t necessarily make it true.
If you oppose getting more involved in the region and particularly in Syria, you need to talk about the complexity of the issues, not just call everyone hyperventilating cowards. When it comes to closing Gitmo, people are hyperventilating cowards. When it comes to ISIS taking over Erbil and Baghdad and wiping out whole communities of people, that’s a pretty big disaster from a variety of points of view.
The best argument against action is the difficulty of achieving success. Trying to say that there isn’t a pretty big, fairly urgent problem here is totally unconvincing and won’t be taken very seriously by too many people.
