U.S. Holocaust Museum Pulls Report on Syria

The United States is so wedded to "humanitarian bombing," more commonly referred to as R2P, that an innocuous academic study, which gamed out alternative approaches to the war in Syria, commissioned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was pulled after it was published online at the end of August. 

The study was pulled not because it was pro- or anti-Obama; the study was pulled because it failed to categorically endorse the use of military force to decapitate a "rogue" regime.

The story by Sopan Deb and Max Fisher, "The Holocaust Museum Sought Lessons on Syria. What It Got Was a Political Backlash," is worth reading. The use of massive military force to eliminate bogeymen inflated by Western propaganda cannot be questioned:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is finding itself in an unfamiliar position: as a lightning rod for the fierce debate over the Obama administration’s role in the Syrian civil war.

The museum is facing withering criticism after pulling a study that it commissioned on Syria and published online Aug. 29. The report examined whether alternate strategies could have lessened the bloodshed, now in its sixth year.

Museum leaders and the study’s authors had sought lessons on how a future president could mitigate similar crises. Though the authors found much to dislike in President Obama’s decisions on Syria, they also concluded that no single American action would have guaranteed a significant reduction in the violence there.

Critics of the study have portrayed that conclusion as an attempt to let Mr. Obama off the hook for the killings in Syria — a weighty charge for the Holocaust museum to confront, given that it is a moral force on issues of war, mass killings and government intervention. The museum ultimately pulled down the study after receiving complaints from allies.

Since then, the museum has been caught in a political debate and faced questions about academic freedom and the board’s ties to the Obama administration.

[snip]

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa divisions, said in an email that she was “disappointed” that the museum withdrew the research.

The study “revealed through rigorous inquiry just how difficult it is to be certain that military intervention will do more good than harm in dynamics as complex as Syria’s,” Ms. Whitson said, “especially when you factor in the disastrous U.S. record for military intervention in the region.”