It’s 2002 All Over Again

I’ve been ruminating for a while about this John Judis column on lefty reluctance to engage in Syria.  Ali Gharib has a good response here, and Dan Trombly here; suffice to say that Judis mischaracterizes the anti-intervention coalition, and can’t provide any detail of what an appropriate intervention ought to look like.

But I suppose what bothers me is that Judis isn’t simply wrong and incoherent as much as he’s rehashing an argument that was done and gone a decade ago.    Attempting to go back to original “left” interventionist principles (note that Judis conflates antagonistic liberal and leftist thought in this effort) without trying to grapple with the utter failure in Iraq and the middling-at-best success in Afghanistan just seems… quaint. It also bears note that the project of dissociating liberal hawkery from the invasion of Iraq is something that more liberal hawks ought to have tried to pursue back in 2003.