The American Conservative

Bob Corker wins some sort of prize for chutzpah with this op-ed:

As Syria slips further into chaos, America is acting hesitantly at a pivotal moment for our national interests and for those of our allies in the region [bold mine-DL].

Unlike many of his Republican Senate colleagues, Corker is on record as a vocal skeptic of aiding the Syrian opposition. Just one year ago, Corker was very leery of greater U.S. involvement in the conflict. He certainly didn’t think this was a “pivotal moment for our national interests” twelve months ago, and nothing has happened in Syria in the last year that would have changed that. Josh Rogin reported at the time:

“I don’t think we know enough about the opposition groups that have become involved or what might happen should Bashar be gone,” said Corker. He said that the information the administration has given him in secret doesn’t match the rhetoric administration officials use when talking about the Syrian opposition in public.

“In the classified briefings I’ve had, I don’t get the sense at all that this is about democracy, OK? This is not some sort of George Washington thing we’re watching,” he said, drawing a distinction between the Syrian uprising and the American revolution.

Fast forward a year. Corker has since replaced Dick Lugar as the ranking Republican member on the Foreign Relations Committee, and now he is suddenly so concerned about administration “dithering” on Syria that he wants to arm the “moderate” opposition. Corker writes:

We must use American resources and ingenuity to help change that — beyond the “nonlethal assistance” we currently provide. This will require weapons and training for rebel units vetted by the United States as well as assistance to improve leadership skills, and cohesiveness in both military and civilian institutions. We should not be engaged in nation building, but we can certainly support Syrians committed to rebuilding their country.

But sending arms alone will not solve the problem. After all, small arms are already flowing to combatants from other sources in the region at an alarming rate. By more fully engaging vetted units and training them to respect the law of armed conflict, protect critical infrastructure and secure dangerous weapons sites, America can make a down payment on Syria’s future by building relationships with future partners.

It goes without saying that Corker never explains why the U.S. “must” do any of the things he recommends. He goes on to say that the U.S. “must be more aggressive in stopping Iranian support for Mr. Assad,” but does not explain what he means by this or how the U.S. would be able to do this. His proposal that the U.S. create “common cause” between Sunnis and Alawites seems utterly unrealistic under the present circumstances.

Corker’s proposal for policing the support provided to anti-Assad forces seems unworkable. Corker writes:

Likewise, public and private sources of support for anti-Assad extremists in Syria should be publicized and targeted with sanctions. Other countries opposed to Mr. Assad, including American allies, must also be much more selective about who they arm and support in the war in Syria.

I have no idea why the Saudis and Qataris would agree to be “much more selective” about which proxies they support in Syria. They are trying to buy influence, and they aren’t likely to be very interested in which groups Washington finds acceptable. Corker’s policy is so filled with qualifications and caveats that it’s clear he doesn’t think that greater U.S. involvement makes much sense. As the ranking Republican member on the FRC, he feels the need to argue for a policy that he thought was unwise just a few months ago. The result is a muddle that makes no sense and is sure to please absolutely no one.

The differences between the administration’s policy and Corker’s position are not that great, and Corker admits as much:

Like the president, I am reluctant to commit the United States as an active participant in a complex and distant war and do not support the deployment of American forces to topple Mr. Assad. But the time for “leading from behind” is over.

In fact, Corker favors doing exactly this, but doesn’t want it to be perceived that way. Fortunately, he isn’t calling for direct intervention in the Syrian conflict. Unfortunately, feels compelled to demand that the U.S. “do more” than it is doing now, so he offers up a half-baked proposal for a limited escalation in U.S. involvement. That makes Corker’s proposal a prime example of demanding that the U.S. “do more” in the conflict simply for the sake of doing it.

Keith Hennessey goes to a lot of trouble to make an irrelevant argument:

I assume that some who read this will react automatically with disbelief and sarcasm. They think they know that President Bush is unintelligent because, after all, everyone knows that. They will assume that I am wrong, or blinded by loyalty, or lying. They are certain that they are smarter than George Bush.

I ask you simply to consider the possibility that I’m right, that he is smarter than you.

As I’ve said on other occasions, intelligence is no guarantee of good judgment, relevant specialized knowledge, or executive competence. A politician can have above-average intelligence and still support disastrous and ill-conceived policies. We see this happen with remarkable frequency. Indeed, a smart politician lacking in humility may think that he has can do things that less ambitious people would never contemplate trying. By many measures, Condi Rice is very smart, but she did a horrible job as National Security Adviser, and her tenure as Secretary of State wasn’t very impressive, either. Bush might very well be smarter than most of Hennessey’s students and he might be smarter than many of us, and it wouldn’t change the fact that some of his signature policies were disasters and some brazenly violated established legal and ethical norms. Being smart is no guarantee against moral and ethical failures, and it’s no guarantee of good judgment.

Consider the example of Mitt Romney. Romney is undeniably very intelligent, so much so that he probably falls into the category of “too smart for his own good” when it comes to politics. Whatever else Romney critics said over the years, no one ever doubted that he was very smart. Regardless, the fact that Romney was obviously very bright didn’t change the reality that he a) knew virtually nothing about foreign policy; b) seemed unconcerned that he didn’t know very much about it; c) endorsed a series of reflexively hawkish policies because that was what a conventional Republican nominee was expected to do. In these respects, there was a frightening resemblance between Romney and Bush in their shared overconfidence and ignorance about the world. Romney endorsed misguided foreign policy ideas because he didn’t know much about the subject, didn’t care about it very much, paid it very little attention despite running for president almost continuously for six years, and because these were the ideas that the “experts” he surrounded himself with favored. Romney’s statements on foreign policy during his presidential campaigns confirmed one thing above all, which is that smart people can believe incredibly stupid and foolish things.

Dan McCarthy asks if a recent survey result shows that George W. Bush is popular again. His conclusion:

Not really, although a Washington Post-ABC poll finds 47 percent of those surveyed rate his job performance favorably. Tellingly, he doesn’t get such high marks for his performance with respect to the economy (43 percent favorable) or invading Iraq (40 percent approve). Which raises the question of what else, exactly, Bush is getting graded on. Despite the framing of the question as job approval, I suspect what comes through here is some nebulous sense that he was a nice guy—maybe a bit like Jimmy Carter. Americans aren’t always terribly attentive to what presidents are doing even while they’re in office. Once they’re out, the public’s view is not likely to be based on a more detailed policy analysis.

I suspect a 47% job approval rating for Bush in 2013 reflects something else in addition to the respondents’ opinion of Bush. If I had to guess, I’d say that Bush’s higher approval mostly comes from people that want to express their disapproval of the current president, and this includes quite a few people who disapproved of Bush while he was in office. One way to do that is to affirm that Bush did a good job. If we look at the results by party identification and ideology, that tells us part of the story. 84% of Republicans and 45% of independents say they approve of how Bush “handled his job as president.” Both figures are much higher than they were in 2008. This reflects the perverse rally effect that causes some people to embrace a disastrous leader simply because people on the other “side” keep attacking him.

The poll shows that there is also a softening of liberal and Democratic attitudes about Bush. At the end of his presidency, these groups almost universally disapproved of Bush, and now it’s closer to three-quarters disapproval.  Bush’s numbers have improved the most with those blocs of voters that have been among the least happy with Obama’s tenure. Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan compared the 2013 result with 2008 Post/ABC polling and found this:

Bush’s biggest gains over the past few years have come among seniors (30 percent approval in 2008, 57 percent approval today [bold mine-DL]), non-college whites (34 percent in 2008, 57 percent now) and moderate/conservative Democrats (10 percent in 2008, 33 percent now).

As far as many people in these groups are concerned, Bush looks better now than he did when he was in office because they have been disappointed or put off by how Obama has governed, but at the time most of them understandably and correctly believed Bush was doing a poor job. Here is a chart that Cillizza and Sullivan used to show the change in attitudes over the last five years:

The passage of time tends to make many people forget what they didn’t like about past presidents, and the longer that someone has been out of office the less inclined non-ideological and weak partisan voters are to hold a grudge against him. Insofar as presidential job approval is an expression of the public’s satisfaction with the state of affairs and the “direction” of the country, increased job approval for Bush is a sort of nostalgia for the previous decade when things seemed and in some cases really were better than they are now. Many of the same Americans that held Bush to be most responsible for the economic woes of the last few years can now look back fondly on the earlier part of his tenure because the worst disasters of his presidency had not yet occurred. A lot of the so-called “comeback” for Bush may come from Americans’ desire to go back to a time before the country suffered all of the consequences of the Bush presidency.

P.S. The fact that respondents 65+ make up the only age cohort that approves of Bush’s job performance suggests that Bush’s approval rating is going to decline in the years to come.

Dan McCarthy points to this Rick Santorum quote from a recent profile of Rand Paul:

Rand Paul’s brand doesn’t line up with all of what our party stands for—on national security, social values, the economy and the role of government in society. His message won’t ultimately lead us to be a more successful party.

It’s not news that Santorum isn’t a fan of Rand Paul. He loathes libertarianism or anything that might be mistaken for libertarianism, and his contempt for Sen. Paul’s father during the 2012 primaries was impossible to miss. Santorum is a useful source if one wants to know what an adherent of unreconstructed Bushism thinks of Paul, but I’m not sure that he “lines up” with most Republicans better on many issues than Paul does. Santorum’s assessment of the internal politics of the GOP would have made sense in 2004, but it doesn’t hold up very well now.

On foreign policy, Santorum and Paul are virtually polar opposites inside the GOP, so it’s fair to say that neither represents a majority of the party. However, Santorum represents the fraction of the GOP that looks back on the Bush years and sees a foreign policy that wasn’t aggressive and combative enough. There’s no question that the party and the country are moving in the other direction, and they have been moving in that direction to get away from the disastrous views of hard-liners just like Santorum. Most Republicans may not agree with Sen. Paul entirely on foreign policy, but the Republican constituency for the aggressive foreign policy Santorum supports is the smallest it has been in over a decade.

On social issues, Santorum is still probably closer to what most in the party believe, but the differences here shouldn’t be exaggerated. Paul isn’t the culture warrior Santorum is, but he is still enough of a social conservative to put off some moderates and libertarians. To the extent that Santorum and Paul differ on “the economy and the role of government in society,” Paul is usually more representative of most conservatives. In practice, Santorum had no serious objections to the expanding role of government in the Bush years, and he had absolutely no objections to increasing government powers in the name of national security. It’s true that most Republicans also aren’t in favor of reducing the size and role of government as much as Paul would prefer, but Santorum’s “big government conservatism” has been tried and rejected as a dead end.

Robert Golan-Vilella also noticed the main flaw in the Hanson article I discussed yesterday:

What is most odd about the piece, however, is how poorly the “neo-isolationist” label appears to fit Obama’s foreign policy—even as Hanson describes it [bold mine-DL].

This is part of what I was trying to say yesterday. Describing Obama’s fairly activist foreign policy as “neo-isolationist” is an absurd exercise in trying to shift the boundaries of foreign policy debate in order to make Obama’s activism seem like a form of radical “disengagement” and “retreat” from the world. We saw much the same thing during the Hagel confirmation spectacle, when we were supposed to believe that someone with a long history of mainstream Republican internationalism was suddenly a “fringe” figure.

Like Golan-Vilella, I think “neo-isolationist” is a meaningless term, and I would add that it has a pernicious and distorting effect on all of our foreign policy debates. If hawks feel compelled to use it, they should at the very least not apply it to someone whose foreign policy is one of largely conventional and fairly hawkish liberal internationalism. Golan-Vilella continues:

The fact is that almost no significant political figure within America’s two major parties holds any views that can fairly be described as “isolationist” or “neo-isolationist.” Democrats and Republicans alike want the United States to have the world’s most powerful military, maintain its alliances and trade with other nations.

Ben Domenech tries defending his very strained comparison between the Iraq war and the ACA:

The Iraq war debacle shows us why it’s important to make the case for policy on the actual grounds the principals believe in, instead of an argument based on building up fear or overpromising on outcome. Rather than resting the case for war on the moral argument for human freedom neoconservatives held, Bush advanced a case designed to bring along the realists, based on faulty intelligence, about the burgeoning threat of weapons of mass destruction [bold mine-DL]. Instead of basing his case for his health care law on its true justification and the moral argument for universal coverage, Obama promised it would address problems it never will, resulting in lower premiums for all, better quality care, and keeping your doctor and plan if you like them.

I’m not interested in the direct comparison of the two policies, which have so little in common as to make them almost entirely incomparable. What stands out here is the strange argument that Bush’s case for war should have been even more ideological and fixated on the idea of “liberating” Iraq than it was. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this was why leading Bush administration members favored regime change. If the “the moral argument for human freedom” had been the primary justification for the invasion, there would have been remarkably little support for the war. There’s no way to know for sure, but my guess is that most Republicans would have been reluctant to support a war justified primarily on these grounds. Not only would “the realists” have refused to go along with it, but I think most Americans would have been skeptical of waging a war primarily for the sake of toppling a dictator. As weak and shoddy as the argument for the invasion was, an argument more focused on ideological goals with less emphasis on the supposed security threat to the U.S. would have been even weaker and less appealing.

Public support for the invasion was based on fear of additional terrorist attacks after 9/11, which the administration exploited as much as it could by grossly exaggerating the danger from Iraq’s supposed weapons programs and inventing connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda. If the administration hadn’t used an argument “based on building up fear,” it probably wouldn’t have been able to demagogue a frightened public into supporting the war. Democracy promotion was the fallback justification for the war when all of the other justifications were exposed as bogus. An Iraq war identified even more closely with democracy promotion from the beginning would have been less popular at the start and would have become even more unpopular over the years.

The point here is that primarily ideological and moral arguments for or against major policies and pieces of legislation aren’t remotely as compelling to most people as they are to the adherents of these views. The impression I get from years of arguing against unnecessary wars is that it doesn’t seem to matter very much to most people that a war is illegal or immoral, but it does matter to them if it turns out to be prolonged or unsuccessful, or if it has no achievable objective. Preventive war is wrong in principle, but explaining that to people doesn’t change their views on attacking Iran. Telling them that it won’t “work” or that it will backfire might.

Scott McConnell comments on hard-liners’ “martyr-state” hysteria regarding Iran:

Those trying to generate hysteria in the United States about Iran’s nuclear program regularly play the crazy Muslim card. Iran, they imply, will become the Tsarnaev brothers with nuclear weapons.

Indeed, hard-liners are happy to go beyond this and to insist that Iran’s leadership is even more suicidal than that, which is what supposedly makes them impossible to deter. As Scott points out, there is no truth in this claim.

American hard-liners misunderstand and misrepresent Shia millennarian beliefs, just as they usually misunderstand and misrepresent taqiyya and veneration of Shia martyrs to make Iranians seem inherently untrustworthy and obsessed with death. As I said last year in response to one of Helprin’s more deranged op-eds:

Practicing dissimulation doesn’t make a person suicidal or prone to attacking others. Quite the contrary. The original purpose for it in Shi’ism was to avoid persecution and death. For Helprin to use that in the same sentence with references to martyrdom suggests that he doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. How a regime uses its soldiers in a conventional war of self-defense doesn’t tell us anything about their willingness to use a nuclear weapon. As I have said before, the veneration of martyrdom in Iranian culture is as strong as it is because of their Shi’ism and their comemoration of the death of Husayn (Hossein), whom they revere as their second imam. When Helprin babbles on about Iranians being “martyrdom-obsessed,” he wants to give the misleading impression that this a country and a regime intent on dying. The regime, like any other regime, is intent on self-preservation.

The idea that Iran’s government is willing to invite its own annihilation in nuclear war requires putting enormous confidence in “a few neoconservative op-eds and a report by a right-wing Israeli think tank, whose claims have been bounced endlessly around the internet,” which is the origin of the “martyr-state” myth. Netanyahu probably felt confident repeating such bogus claims before the U.N. because he knew that his main audience in the United States wouldn’t know that he was repeating pure propaganda.

Victor Davis Hanson complains about so-called “neo-isolationism” under Obama:

Conservatives have jumped on the president’s trivial gestures — the “apology tour,” the bows to foreign authoritarians and monarchs. In isolation, these would be irrelevant, but they reflect an underlying policy of multipolarity and multilateralism.

Obama’s apparent neutrality in the matter of the “Malvinas,” his initial pressure on Israel about the settlements, his courting of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman Turkey, his seeking of the permission of the Arab League and the United Nations (but not the U.S. Congress) to intervene in Libya — all send signals that there is no privilege to be derived from being a supporter of America or its values.

If there’s one thing I’ll never quite figure out, it’s how an “underlying policy of multipolarity and multilateralism” can ever be “neo-isolationist,” but Hanson wants us to believe that the U.S. under Obama is “neo-isolationist.” It helps that Hanson is using all these terms as insults, but it should occur to Hanson at some point while writing this article that these are opposing positions. If Obama were a “neo-isolationist,” he wouldn’t seek the approval of regional and international institutions for much of anything, much less make it a requirement before going to war. If he were a “neo-isolationist,” it is doubtful that he would be trying to rebuild the relationship with Turkey that his predecessor wrecked and he has handled poorly in the past. Of course, Hanson’s use of “neo-isolationist” is just intended as mockery. That is the thing Republican hawks are trained to call the people they attack, and so that is what Hanson calls Obama.

What stands out in Hanson’s catalogue of errors is the sheer irrelevance of most of what he’s talking about. The “apology tour” never happened. It’s pure fiction. U.S. neutrality over the Falklands dates back decades. Obama’s position is essentially no different from the one taken by his predecessors dating back to Reagan. It is only now that Hanson and other hawks pretend to care about this neutrality, because they think they can shoehorn it into a bogus narrative about allies betrayed. Obama has been “courting” Erdogan (a.k.a., trying to repair the horribly damaged U.S.-Turkish relationship). What is Hanson’s point? Once we set aside the silly “neo-Ottoman” distortion, which is every bit as silly as the “neo-isolationist” one, why does this bother Hanson? He doesn’t explain here, but it’s presumably because the relationship with Turkey that the previous administration trashed so stupidly is slowly being repaired, which reflects poorly on the administration that wrecked it in the first place.

I talked about Bush’s role in creating the bankruptcy of Republican foreign policy thinking earlier today. This Hanson article is a good exhibit of that bankruptcy on full display.

While he rejects pro-Bush revisionism, Dan Drezner nonetheless tries to give George W. Bush a little bit of credit:

Second, ironically, Bush’s legacy will be a bit more buoyant because the quality of post-Bush GOP thinking on foreign policy has been so piss-poor that Bush really does look good by comparison. It is worth remembering that, for all of the criticisms of Bush’s foreign policy rhetoric, he kept anti-Muslim hysteria somewhat in check. He boosted foreign aid through PEPFAR, which might be his most significant foreign policy legacy. And the Bush foreign policy of 2008 looked dramatically different from the Bush foreign policy of 2003, which suggests some degree of adaptation and learning.

Bush’s record in Africa and his work to improve relations with India are among the very few redeeming features of his tenure, which is why I suspect the current very negative assessment of his foreign policy record will withstand the scrutiny of later generations. Even when we take genuine Bush successes into account, the record of failure on Bush’s own terms speaks for itself. Is Bush “the most disastrous foreign policy president of the post-1945 era,” as Drezner describes him? Possibly not, but he has a very strong claim to that title, and the arguments against describing him that way are exceptionally weak. These arguments usually focus on the fact that his successor didn’t reverse Bush’s entire approach to national security and foreign policy, and Bush loyalists conclude that this must mean that Bush was right on the issues where there was continuity. That’s not necessarily true, but the bigger problem for pro-Bush revisionists is that the Bush years were marred by foreign policy incompetence that went far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. The “freedom agenda” was ill-conceived and ended in failure in virtually every place it was tried. Relations with Russia sank to a post-Cold War low in no small part because of administration bungling and needless provocation in the form of continued NATO expansion and proposed missile defense installations. The awful handling of relations with major European states and with Turkey during most of Bush’s tenure serves as a cautionary tale of how a great power should not treat its allies.

I suppose it’s true that that “the Bush foreign policy of 2008 looked dramatically different from the Bush foreign policy of 2003″ in that the grand ambitions and ideological delusions of 2003 had all been exposed as the nonsense they always were, but most of the differences between 2003 and 2008 were changes forced on the administration by events and by the manifest failures of its earlier decisions. It’s obviously true that Bush wasn’t launching any new preventive wars in 2008, but the “adaptation and learning” that did take place came grudgingly. What few changes occurred during Bush’s second term came about in large part because the preventive war Bush launched in 2003 had turned into such a debacle for Iraq and America that “staying the course” was no longer feasible.

Republican foreign policy thinking since Bush left office has indeed been very poor, but Drezner is mistaken to say that this makes Bush look better by comparison. The experience of the Bush presidency inflicted enormous damage on the GOP’s reputation for competence in conducting foreign policy, but the greater damage to Republican foreign policy thinking happened earlier. The lockstep support for the administration’s preferred policies that was expected on the right contributed mightily to the intellectual bankruptcy that has been on display in the last four years. Bush’s second term was in some ways worse than the first in this regard, because at that point support for Bush and the Iraq war had been reduced mostly to those inside the Republican coalition and the need to try to justify and vindicate Bush’s Iraq decision became proof of Republican and conservative bona fides. The “surge” debate served as the venue for expressing support for Bush and the Iraq war, and the same enforcement of mindless litmus tests on politicians and pundits that we saw in the early part of the decade happened all over again.

If you want to know how Republican foreign policy thinking reached its present sorry state, just review the record of pro-war and pro-Bush conformism on the right from 2002 on. Instead of rigorous and critical thinking on policy, conservatives became accustomed to inventing defenses for administration positions and serving as enforcers against critics from the center and left and against dissenters in their own ranks. Having becoming used to shaping their foreign policy views around what “their” president did and said, many on the right were left adrift when Bush left office. Bush was extremely unpopular, so conservatives didn’t want to identify openly with him for political reasons, but on policy many of them were so used to endorsing whatever he had done that they couldn’t design a distinctive and relevant agenda of their own. Most Republicans defaulted to opposing almost anything Obama did, partly because they believed that this is how the other party had treated Bush and partly for lack of any other ideas. To some extent, Republicans and conservatives did that to themselves, but Bush was the one they were following and he is partly responsible for the results.

In the wake of the Boston bombings, there have been a few articles discussing the effects that the Tsarnaevs’ Chechen background might have on U.S.-Russian relations and diplomacy related to the conflict in Syria. I doubt that there will be much of a discernible effect on either of these, but they’re worth pondering. A recent Post article began this way:

The possible link between the Boston Marathon bombings and Chechnya’s struggle for independence from Russia is likely to harden Russian opposition to any outside intervention in Syria and complicate the question of whether to arm the Syrian rebels.

It’s probably true that the Boston bombings will reinforce anti-interventionists’ existing views, but other than that I don’t see the attack having much of an effect. Considering how strongly opposed Russia already was to Western intervention and to any Western support for the Syrian opposition, I don’t know that their opposition can be “hardened” much more than it is. American public opinion was already heavily against greater U.S. involvement in Syria before the bombings, and the Syria policy debate among politicians and pundits will likely remain more or less unchanged. Arming the Syrian opposition has always been a poor idea, and one reason for that is the inherent difficulty in keeping weapons supplied to one group from falling into the hands of others. Nothing that happened in Boston over the last week makes this any more or less complicated than it already is. The case for intervention in Syria certainly doesn’t look any better than it did before, but that is because it was never persuasive in the first place. As for U.S.-Russian relations, any Russian attempts to exploit the bombings in order to advance other policy arguments will most likely backfire and sour relations with Washington further, but otherwise I don’t see significant improvement or deterioration in the relationship happening in the near future.

Charles King elaborated on the possibility that this could influence the Syria debate in an article for Foreign Affairs:

Now, Russians have already begun to portray the Tsarnaevs as an unlikely link between Boston and Damascus. There are somewhere “between 600 and 6,000” Chechens from the North Caucasus fighting in Syria, said [Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Vladimir] Kotliar in a recent interview with Russian media, “and from what happened in Boston, perhaps Americans will finally draw the lesson that there are no good terrorists and bad terrorists, no ‘ours’ and ‘yours.’” Keep arming the Syrian rebels, the argument goes, and sooner or later you will have to face the consequences of a Syria overtaken by Islamist radicals.

That might not be a bad line of reasoning, especially given what we know about the complicated mix of ideologies and motivations inside the Syrian opposition movement. And after Boston, Moscow now has an additional argument, however tenuous, against greater international involvement in Syria.

I have seen the “Chechens in Syria” claim before, and it is possible that there are some fighting on the side of anti-Assad forces, but it is a claim that never seems to be corroborated. Even if there are Chechens fighting Assad in Syria, some interventionists will come up with some way to blame Russia for that as well. There are jihadist groups among the anti-Assad forces, but if this hasn’t discouraged advocates for intervention or arming the opposition before now I’m not sure why the Tsarnaevs’ attack would change that.