Over There

Another Intervention?   

Anti-ISIS airstrikes aren’t about keeping Americans safe.  

Slate has partnered with Brooklyn Brewery and RISC to bring its hit war correspondent interview series to our readers. In this fourth installment, Steve Hindy, founder of Brooklyn Brewery and a former Associated Press foreign correspondent, sits down Philip Gourevitch, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.

Last night, the Obama administration launched airstrikes against ISIS-controlled targets in Syria, following through on its promise to fight back against the Islamist group. According to Gourevitch, though, a military response has little to do with protecting Americans, and is simply the continuation of the misguided American policy of interventionism in the Middle East. In the clip above, he weighs in on the complexities of the sprawling war on terrorism, ISIS’s true motivations, and how this latest intervention—like the ones before it—will likely do more harm than good, both to American interests and to the region itself.