From the people who brought you the Iraq war...
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others, sometimes not so much.
"Only resolved US leadership has the potential to halt the bloodshed." That is as clear an assertion of American exceptionalism – that the US is unparalleled in its goodness, and therefore must act unilaterally – as you'll ever read. The argument is that there is nothing else that can be done, no creative thinking possible beyond going to war now.
The assertion that that the US "cannot outsource its strategic and moral responsibilities" is a broadside against multilateralism that is straight out of Neocon 101. The argument has long been that the dithering of the United Nations, NATO allies, and others must never slow the US down. Of course, the counterargument is that the world is a complex place, and even its most powerful nation is both limited in what it can accomplish alone and likely to find its interests are best served in the long run by doing so.
Also worth noting is that Rove and some other signatories of the letter opposed Obama's cautious approach to the Libya intervention, working through NATO, and waiting for UN approval before sending in the bombers. In March of last year, shortly after the UN authorized the attacks, Rove asserted on Fox News that multilateralism "never works" and criticized Obama as seeing the US as this "nice little country on the international stage that’s going to be bound up by multilateral commitments and multilateral leadership. And that the United States makes a mistake when it tries to lead."
Well, Libya (a much easier problem with its homogeneity and the weakness of Qaddafi's military and state in general) was a raging success.
The signatories also seem to forget what happened in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq that most of them strongly argued for, on much the same grounds as the recent letter on Syria. They warn, in urging for US action, that "Syria's escalating conflict ... could provide an opening for terrorist groups like al Qaeda to exploit." Well, yes it could. In fact, it is.
But recent US interventions in the area don't set a happy precedent for keeping Al Qaeda out of a country. Al Qaeda's allies in Iraq prior to the US invasion in 2003, till that point a minor presence there and confined to autonomous and US-friendly Kurdistan, became a major player in the country, killing thousands there (among them many US soldiers) and staging attacks in neighboring Jordan. Al Qaeda's self-described affiliate the Islamic State in Iraq remains a danger to that country's stability today.
Jihadis radicalized by the US occupation in Iraq and toughened by fighting against US forces, particularly in Anbar Province, which neighbors Syria, are now fighting against Assad in Syria, bringing the IED manufacturing techniques they honed around cities like Fallujah to the streets of Syria.
