As I have said, many times: I do not know what the right answer is when it comes to intervening in Syria.  Every option is bad, with negative consequences and poor results.  If  I was a Member of Congress I would be frantically trying to go through what information I have available, in order to determine the least-worst scenario and vote for that.  Because of all of that, I cannot in good conscience call for Members of Congress (Republican AND Democrat) to do anything except vote their consciences: if I don’t have the right answer myself, I shouldn’t try to second-guess a legislator’s own sense of morality.

But I will so totally give tactical advice on when to vote.  Glenn Reynolds’ advice here is spot-on:

If I were the GOP — in both the House and Senate — I wouldn’t let a single Republican vote be cast until all the Democrats have voted.

Do this, please.  Make the Democrats sweat this vote.  They’re the ones who decided to run for the last decade on a ‘peace’ platform – and then elect a guy whose natsec strategy is to do everything that the Left thought that George W Bush did, only incompetently.  They’re also the ones who have to choose between heeding the desires of the leader of their party, and the desires of the American people; my sympathy for the average Democratic legislator caught in this cleft stick is somewhere below nil right now.  So I think that now is a marvelous time to encourage a little long-term thinking in the American Left, using a time-honored educational principle:

Negative reinforcement.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: For non-legislators reading this… you can encourage our legislators to do this, or you can encourage our legislators not to do this.  I am utterly uninterested in doing the latter; how about you?