Moral indifference allowed Syria crisis to occur

Generals fight the last war. Liberals protest them. The statements of groups on the left regarding Syria are redolent with references to Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Not mentioned is the first Gulf War, which promptly ended by diktat of George H.W. Bush, or military actions in Kosovo or Bosnia, which did what they set out to do. The killing stopped.

What perplexes me is how the calls for Congress to rebuff President Barack Obama are empty of moral outrage. The civil war in Syria has cost more than 110,000 lives. It has produced a humanitarian calamity: well over 2 million refugees. Bashar Assad has massacred his own people by conventional means and is accused of using poison gas several times, most recently on Aug. 21, when his military murdered 1,429 people, including more than 400 children.

What do liberalism’s longtime journal, and others on the left propose to do about all this? Go to the international community.

Where is this entity? The United Nations, where not a peep of outrage has come from Russia or China. Both have stymied any attempt to rein in the Washington Post Writers Group Assad regime. In 2011, the two vetoed a Security Council resolution that threatened mere sanctions if Syria didn’t stop killing its own people. Syria took heart and stepped up the killing.

I pick on the American left because it is liberal and because that suggests empathy, concern and internationalism. I look to liberals to make common cause with the underprivileged, the unfortunate and the weak. If that doesn’t describe the people of Syria, then what does? Can the U.S. help them? We certainly could have. We certainly didn’t.

Last month’s chemical-weapons attack is reminiscent of the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica in which about 8,000 Bosnian Mus- lims were murdered. This happened in Europe, 50 years after the Holocaust. This happened with plenty of advance warning, after numerous previous atrocities and with a supine Dutch U.N. contingent nearby.

Srebrenica was what the former U.N. official Diego E. Arria calls “slow-motion genocide.” It happened because NATO had already shown that it would allow it to happen.

Something similar happened with the Syrian gas attack. More than 400 children died because the world had already shown it would do nothing about Syrian war crimes. We were told this was not our problem. We cannot be the world’s policeman. With a Pentagon budget of $525.4 billion, our forces are stretched too thin, and we’re out of money.

So, in Washington or Langley or someplace, we watched as poison gas was being readied and commands were being issued. We could have made a difference. We could have at least tried. We should all be ashamed.

The inescapable truth is that the world needs a policeman. The inescapable truth is that only the U.S. can play cop. We have the wherewithal. Afurther inescapable truth is that evil exists and needs to be fought. I have always thought, maybe naively, that these were values embedded in the very soul of American liberalism. It seems I am wrong.

Someone should have told the children.