Anne-Marie Slaughter wonders why more liberal hawks aren’t advocating for a war with Syria:
Slaughter said she wants to hear more from the intellectuals who joined her in urging intervention in Kosovo, Rwanda and, most recently, Libya. “The place to look, I think, is not 10 years ago [in Iraq], it’s Libya,” she said. “Where’s the Libya coalition?”
Larison’s answer:
We can’t understand the relative lack of liberal support for Syrian intervention without first remembering that there was not that much liberal support for the war in Libya, either. The aftermath of the Libyan war has not changed the minds of skeptics and opponents, and the experience of Libya seems to have been enough of a headache for the administration that it wants to avoid an even more difficult war in Syria. As far as many liberal Syria hawks are concerned, intervention in Libya was a great success that ought to have been repeated in Syria. Because they kept assuming that Obama would change his position on Syria as he did on Libya, liberal hawks now seem baffled by ongoing administration reluctance to start a new war. Liberal hawks appear to be so confused about the limited support on the left for military action in Syria because they are misreading the political landscape here at home, and they mistake their unduly positive view of the Libyan war for one that is widely shared.
The Dish 