Killing to Save in Syria: When Liberalism is Lethal
...This is not a new position for The New Republic or progressives. A century ago the magazine, along with most progressive intellectuals, called for the U.S. to intervene in World War I in order to save innocent Europeans from German aggressions. President Woodrow Wilson, who declared that the U.S. had the duty to “lift the burdens of mankind in the future and show the paths of freedom to all the world,” took that advice. Some 116,000 U.S. servicemen were killed and more than 200,000 wounded in the war, while countless thousands of German conscripts were cut down by American steel in what many historians now see as an exercise in imperial competition that laid the ground for the rise of fascism....

...More recent progressive-led humanitarian interventions were smaller-scale but yielded similar results. Bill Clinton‘s incursion into Somalia killed 18 American soldiers and hundreds of Somali militiamen and civilians, and brought no improvement to the world’s most misgoverned country. Likewise, NATO’s bombing of Kosovo left hundreds of civilians dead and gave the upper hand to the Kosovo Liberation Army — an organization described by Clinton’s own special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, as “without any questions, a terrorist group” — which conducted its own campaign of ethnic cleansing after the war....