Millman longs for a term “for people who are eager to fight without being very clear on whom they want to fight or why”:
The chief argument on the part of advocates for Syrian intervention is that if we don’t do something, events will take a course beyond our control. Perhaps Assad will win; perhaps the rebels will win, but will resent us for not helping them; perhaps the war will drag on and spread to neighboring countries; perhaps Syria will fall apart entirely with parts of the country being taken over by terrorists; and whatever happens, thousands, even tens of thousands more people will die. War is proposed not to counter a specific threat, but to assert control over a chaotic situation. The enemy is the unknown itself.
I don’t want to call people making arguments like these “hawks” because I think that grants an argument that hasn’t properly been made: that we are debating about how serious to take and how seriously to respond to a threat. We aren’t debating about that yet, because a coherent picture of an adversary posing a threat has not yet been drawn by the advocates of military action. Because they are not really proposing action to meet a threat – they are proposing action so as to be involved.
I think that’s a helpful distinction. Larison offers up a dinosaur analogy:
This reminded me of an old column from The Economist from long ago in which Paul Wolfowitz was described as a “velociraptor” to capture how much more aggressive he was than ordinary hawks. Using this description, we could say that a “velociraptor” sees threats where they don’t exist, exaggerates the ones that do, and always argues for taking a hard line against all of them. In other words, a fanatic.
But he contends that Syria “hawks” do in fact know their enemy:
Almost all Syria hawks are Syria hawks because they are hawkish on Iran, and view the conflict in Syria in those terms. They are very clear on whom they want to fight and why. They also happen to be horribly wrong.
The Dish 