As for our overall strategic goal, we have to keep in mind that this is a two-front war, that we’re fighting Assad and pushing out the Russians and Iranians in order to clear the way for also getting rid of the Islamic State. The model for that, as I’ve pointed out before, is the question of whether we should fight the Nazis or the Soviets. It’s not really a question of which one we have to fight, but of which one we’re going to fight first.

How long will it take and how much will it cost? We can make guesses, but it would be foolish to assume that anyone can give definitive answers, because that’s not how war works. Of course we don’t know for sure how long it’s going to take, or what it’s going to cost, or who our allies are going to be, or how we’ll put together a new government. Those are objections that can be made with equal force to just about any military intervention, and making such objections the centerpiece of foreign policy would result in a non-interventionism so thorough as to be pacifist.

Do advocates of intervention have to answer all of these question before “it makes sense to discuss the idea further”? You know, I’d be happy if we were discussing it at all, because that would be an upgrade from ignoring it completely.