That just isn't persuasive. I predict that if we don't invade Syria, there is exactly zero chance that history will remember Obama as another Chamberlain as a result. And I sincerely wish I could put a lot of money on that proposition in Las Vegas. The piece goes on:

As Obama said in his Rose Garden statement Saturday: "If we won't enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules? To governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorists who would spread biological weapons? To armies who carry out genocide?" So the stakes look very high indeed.

Actually, Obama's argument looks very weak indeed. If we "won't enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act," it says nothing about our resolve to stand up to terrorists who would spread biological weapons. What kind of sense does that even make? Imagine we discover that al-Qaeda terrorists in tribal regions of Pakistan or Yemen possess a biological agent that could kill millions. Does anyone doubt the U.S. would act? Will anyone say, if something like that ever happens, "These bio-weapons are very dangerous, but I don't believe we have the resolve to destroy them given that we didn't intervene in Syria"?

Come on.

What about governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? Well, I imagine that America's failure to stop Israel or India or Pakistan or North Korea from going nuclear, as well as its invasion of Iraq on overhyped fears of its nuclear program, are among the factors the Iranians and others consider when pursuing nukes. It would be very strange if, instead of looking at American nuclear policy, they decided to instead extrapolate based on our actions in Syria. And when I say it would be strange, I mean that obviously no one would proceed that way.

Daniel Larison writes:

Appeasement is irrelevant to the debate over Syria, since no one is suggesting that the U.S. or its allies give anything up to Assad. The debate has focused entirely on whether and how much to use force in Syria’s civil war.

Exactly.

Hirsh concludes his piece by arguing that "it was just this kind of war weariness that created Neville Chamberlain, and his foreign policy of 'positive appeasement' as he called it, in the years after the terrible bloodletting of World War I. If one becomes unwilling to strike dictators and mass murderers, all that remains is to appease them." Every part of that part of that argument is wrong. The war weariness of post-WWI Britain was very different from the war weariness of present day America, and an unwillingness to strike dictators who kill their own people is not the same as appeasement. By Hirsh's logic, it is imperative that we immediately invade North Korea because otherwise we are appeasing it, and inviting it to begin a blitzkrieg across the Western world, because Hitler. The approach he implies -- intervention wherever there is a dictator or a mass murder -- is a recipe for far more war, and far more misery from war.