Freddie deBoer: The Syrian question has come to an important stage, the reemergence of the liberal hawks. We’ve reached the point in the cycle of American military adventurism — a rhythm as predictable and unchanging as the progression of the seasons — where some progressives and liberals dip their toes into support for the latest war. I don’t mean to overgeneralize; almost every prominent military conflict at least provokes inter-liberal debate, and some of the most effective critiques of bombing Syria have come from liberals. (Scott Lemieux of Lawyers Guns and Money, for example, or Amy Davidson at The New Yorker, or Juan Cole of the University of Michigan.) What’s inevitable, however, is a very public debate among prominent liberals on the question of the next righteous conflict in the American adventure. These debates have the character of ritual; they appear, often, as arguments that exists not to be settled but to be seen. […] This conflicted attitude towards liberal interventionism is epitomized by recent reversals on the Libyan civil war, where NATO picked a winner and the media, dutifully, has declared victory. Retroactive support for an American war is almost too perfect an example of this kind of thinking — settling on a side only after the issue has been decided, mistaking the power of hindsight for the possibility of wisdom. But Libya is a good example of the power of positive thinking and, more, the dominant influence of the conventional wisdom on media progressives. There is a Libyan reality, but there is also the conventional wisdom that plays on TV, and the conventional wisdom decided awhile ago that Libya was a success. Unfortunately for liberal supporters of humanitarianism via explosion, Libya is not nearly as compelling a data point as they seem to believe. Since Qaddafi was killed by the surgical precision of a knife in his rectum and a bullet in his head (sans trial, naturally), Libya has not been the kind of place the militarists who celebrate it would want to hang out. Libya has been hit with waves of political assassination; its new government has failed to secure basic infrastructural and administrative needs, and rushed to engage in hideously homophobic rhetoric; and minority populations like sub-Saharan Africans and Christians have been targeted for violence and oppression. This is all simply to say that civil wars tend to result in chaos and atrocity regardless of who won, and that great powers merely choose winners, and that the short-term requirements of politics have nothing whatsoever to do with the long-term good of actual people. In any event, imperial privilege makes every country a canvas, and those who call for war will paint Libya as they may. Our political class has forgotten the violent reprisals against the ethnic groups unfortunate enough to be on the wrong side of the Kosovo conflict. The crimes against the losers in Libya will be similarly discarded; such memories are inconvenient. More here.