Our Syria Myopia - The Daily Beast: The big difference between Syria on the one hand and Afghanistan and Iraq on the other is that in Syria Americans can still claim innocence, which is how we like it. As a country, we’re more attracted to cleaning up messes made by others than the ones we make ourselves. And just as our media generally allows hawks like John McCain to advocate military intervention in Syria without quizzing them about the interventions they advocated in the past, we expect the rest of the world to wipe the slate clean every time America loses interest in one war and gears up for another.
I understand the impulse for America to “do something” in Syria. I grasp the logic behind funding some of the militias fighting Bashar al-Assad, even if America’s history of funding militias may be propelling Afghanistan and Iraq toward civil war. But there’s something disgraceful about our tendency to wax moralistic about preventing suffering in countries in which we have not yet intervened while we brazenly ignore the suffering we have helped cause in the countries in which we have.