This is the wrong charge to level:
It has been alleged by some commentators that U.S. President Barack Obama -- by doing nothing to halt the carnage -- is responsible for more deaths in Syria than President George W. Bush was in Iraq.
The article goes on to describe the complexities of Syria that argue against the easy success of an early and decisive intervention. Fair enough. But I never charged that the results would be cleaner--just that we lost an opportunity to depose an enemy by supporting rebels when Assad was on the ropes.
But the article's angle and my hopes are not relevant for my purposes here.
My focus is that I reject the charge as wrong and irrelevant. President Obama is not responsible for the killings. The correct charge is that President Obama's hands-off, anti-Iraq approach has not been superior to President Bush's intervention in Iraq.
With deaths in Syria at 150,000 in three years and deaths in Iraq less than that in 11 years (in countries with roughly the same population), the question is the effectiveness of foreign policies in response to killings.
Remember, Saddam was killing Iraqis long before we got there. But the Left has consistently charged that we made the situation worse by intervening. If only we'd left Iraqis alone, they would have sorted it out on their own and not provoked jihadis to flock to Iraq and raise the body count beyond what Iraqis would have done.
Heck, some proposed we simply arm the Shias and Kurds to resist Saddam (remember, too, that regime change in Iraq was our official policy long before 2003, signed by President Clinton)--the proposal they rejected in Syria.
So when the fighting in Syria started, the Obama administration, citing lessons from Iraq, declined to intervene so we would not "make matters worse," as they charged we had in Iraq.
Matters got way worse in Syria without us (but with Russia and Iran helping Assad freely). The body count escalated faster, making the rate of killing higher in Syria (50,000 per year on average in Syria and probably well under 13,000 per year in Iraq--so even if you double Iraqi casualties beyond the best-documented estimates, the rate is still half of Syria's casualty rate).
And jihadis flocked to Syria in even higher numbers than they did to Iraq, which the Left alleged they would not have done if we were not there to "provoke" them.
And remember that the killings in Iraq the last couple years have gone up as the result of our departure from Iraq and because of the blowback from Syria fighting--which our hands-off approach did not alleviate. So our policies are affecting both sides of that better-or-worse equation.
Remember, too, that the casualties in Iraq were far higher because the Iranians and Syrians funnelled arms, fighters, and jihadis into Iraq to foment civil strife and try to provoke a full-blown civil war. By the time these two invasions kicked off during spring 2004, the largely Baathist resistance was burning out through fall and winter 2003-2004, with Saddam captured in December 2003. Our total casualties in Iraq dropped during this period, and we suffered about 20 KIA in February 2004. Absent the Iranian and Syrian intervention--which created a whole new war beyond the war to overthrow Saddam and then defeat his Baathist resistance--the death count "because of our invasion" would have been far lower all around.
And at the end of our battlefield victory in Iraq, we left the Iraqis with mostly defeated enemies and the opportunity to build a democratic country.
In Syria, the murderous dictator Assad may win or the murderous jihadis may win, but we are only belatedly trying to support non-jihadi rebels with arms.
Although I understand why the charge by some commentators is being made, the charge is not precise enough to accurately describe the situation.
