Syria

It's strange how life intersects sometimes. Last week, I happened to see an old episode of The West Wing television series. At one point President Bartlett asks his newly hired deputy communications director: "Why is an American life worth more than any other life?" The response he receives is: "I don't know, sir, but it is."

After a few days of brooding, the president orders American troops into the fictional African country of Equatorial Kundu to end a Rwandan-like genocide.

And then, within a week, I saw the American Experience's portrait of Bill Clinton. And we see the president announce what came to be known as the Clinton Doctrine -- developed as a response to the Bosnian genocide:

It's easy ... to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brush land in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.

The civilian death count in Syria is now beyond 6400. And, the success of the Arab Spring in Syria and elsewhere is the surest way to protect ourselves against terrorism. So, how does the conflict in Syria not implicate our interests and values? Syria is not even all that hard to pronounce. America's Alibis for Not Helping Syria