should still implies can

It's hard to imagine a better instrument for demonstrating the rapid onset amnesia of contemporary America than the Syrian civil war. Comparing the arguments and idiom of warmongering from the pre-Iraq days to those now is remarkable. The recent 10 year anniversary of the war in Iraq, and the attendant commentary, puts this phenomenon into a particularly sad relief. I was thinking yesterday that the fact that there is no proffered national security justification for intervening in Syria is not a political hindrance for hawks, but rather a boon. If a justification is vulnerable to rebuttal, hey, just drop it entirely, and make your case more unified, simpler. Even if that justification was once seen as the only important justification for war.

What depresses me most, though, is that the battle is still fought in the realm of "should" and seems so far removed from the realm of "can." I read the various arguments back and forth on Syria-- where these arguments actually happen, in blog comments and on Twitter and Facebook, not in disconnected essays by the prominent-- and the argument is still whether the United States should liberate the Syrian people, not whether the United States can. The most vital and enduring lesson of Iraq, the limitations of our competence, wisdom, and goodness, has disappeared into the ether. It's like there was never any doubt. There is no question that the United States can destroy the Assad regime. But as Iraq shows, this is a question almost entirely ancillary to whether the United States can deliver a world to the Syrian people that is better, more stable, more democratic, or more free. That's the question, and yet it goes largely ignored. Even as they argue against it, non-interventionists are forced into the position of arguing the merits of a question based on fantasy.

All of this, before we even consider deepening the precedent of the United States helping to settle civil wars, or our loose commitment to democracy, or the schizophrenia of our preferences regarding Islamist insurgency, or the near-certain persecution of Syrian Alawites and Christians, or of blowback, or the inevitable spillover of hostility, or of antagonism of Iran....

Perhaps the preoccupation with the question of the righteous over the question of the possible shouldn't surprise me. Americans desperately need to believe in our military omnipotence. Even many of my progressive friends to this day talk and act as if our military success can always be presumed. Discussion of Iraq and Afghanistan remain compartmentalized, contained. The past ten years have represented too grievous an injury to a consciousness that cries out for belief in American power, and so with a puff of smoke and an invocation of "should," so uninterested in "can," those years are gone.