Turkey is also leading the support of armed insurrection, so we could go along with that course of action without getting out ahead of anyone. It really is important to knock the Syria sword from Iran's hand (which will dull the Hezbollah dagger that Iran has, too), if we can.
The problem of growing chaos in Syria that could threaten the region's tenuous stability could benefit us, too. Since Turkey is supporting open revolt, the option of Assad quickly winning and restoring the quiet of a prison just isn't there. And if unrest spreads in syria and threatens to unleash chaos that spreads regionally, Turkey will have more incentive to decisively intervene to do the only thing that could end the immediate crisis quickly and contain the chaos--take down Assad with Turkey's military driving on Damascus to do the job.
I don't mind learning lessons from Iraq to apply to Syria, but if we don't comprehend Iraq, why bother drawing comparisons? But when we decide what we should and can do, this type of thinking is just infuriating:
What is surprising, though, is that despite the disaster of Iraq, looming withdrawal in what will amount to defeat in Afghanistan, and, to put it charitably, the ambiguous result of the U.N.-sanctioned, NATO-led, and Qatari-financed intervention that brought down Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime, is how nearly complete the consensus for strong action has been even among less hawkish liberals, whether what is done takes the form of the United States and its NATO allies arming the Free Syrian Army, opening so-called humanitarian corridors, or encouraging Turkey and a coalition of the willing within the Arab League to do so. British columnist Jonathan Freedland summed up this view when he wrote recently in the Guardian that the West must not "make the people of Homs pay the price for the mistake we made in Baghdad." [emphasis added]
I'll ignore the excessive pessimism about Afghanistan and grant that other than giving a dose of lead justice to a dictator that Libya's outcome is still in doubt--but the cost in lives (to us, anyway, if not for Libyans) was literally nothing so the scale of what intervention achieves has a lower bar to be judged worth the cost.
But what am I to make of the insistence that Iraq is a "disaster" as a given fact for the purpose of deciding what to do about Syria? Is the author mad? I have grave worries that the Obama administration is willing to do what it takes to defend our gains in Iraq, but we did achieve much by destroying the Saddam regime and then fighting Iran and al Qaeda in Iraq for years in defense of the new Iraqi government. And never forget the alternatives to destroying the Saddam regime.
We achieved a lot in Iraq--and could yet win more, perhaps even counting Syria as a spin off win with the benefit of hindsight. But we could lose part or all of what we won in Iraq if we can't even recognize what we've achieved. And we could fail to exploit opporutnities for victory in Syria if we try to apply a faulty Iraq template to our decisions in Syria.
