In which Nicholas Kristof hurls a Hail Mary toward Assad

Unlike several New York Times columnists, Nicholas Kristof usually gets his facts straight.  And in his advocacy over decades for victims of war and rapine, he's developed a signature line of argument: Okay, it may be imprudent/ineffective for the U.S. to intervene militarily. But we can do x, y and z -- a carefully calibrated and coordinated range of diplomatic, economic and sub-military measures -- to pressure a brutal dictator or warlord to stop or reduce the killing. Such has been Kristof's m.o. in columns urging action in Darfur, South Sudan, and I think, a range of other conflict zones.

His advocacy today for a strike on Syria seems uncharacteristically sloppy, a mesh of unargued or thinly argued assumptions: When slaughter in civil war escalates, it's the U.S.'s responsibility to step in. Arming Syrian rebels earlier might have built a more viable or cohesive or moderate opposition and reduced the slaughter.  A punitive strike now may not only deter further chemical weapons deployment but also cause moderate rebels to spring out of Syrian soil like Spartoi.

In which Kristof plays me like a fiddle

When I saw the headline, Obama AWOL in Syria, I thought, "there goes Kristof again" -- the ultimate advocate for humanitarian intervention often carefully defined not to include military intervention per se). Darfur, South Sudan, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria...

I read his case for the U.S. helping to topple Assad, and I won't presume to judge its merits, but it crossed that two-minute op-ed-reading threshold where you're following an argument and have not tipped into spending most of your mental energy pushing back.

Then, this caveat near the end got my attention, first because it struck me as a tad narcissistic, then because I realized it wasn't, because my own first response to the headline demonstrated how necessary it was: