Mohammed Badra/Reuters
A major study of the Obama Administration’s policy on Syria, undertaken by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has been pulled after sections that were given to Tablet magazine were harshly criticized. The report would have been launched on Sept. 11 at an event at the U.S. Institute for Peace. The paper, using computational modeling and game theory, claimed that “a variety of factors, which were more or less fixed, made it very difficult from the beginning for the U.S. government to take effective action to prevent atrocities in Syria, even compared with other challenging policy contexts.” Literary critic Leon Wieseltier slammed the Museum for its decision even to take on the study: “Shame on the Holocaust Museum, releasing an allegedly scientific study that justifies bystanderism.” He added, “If I had the time I would gin up a parody version of this that will give us the computational-modeling algorithmic counterfactual analysis of John J. McCloy’s decision not to bomb the Auschwitz ovens in 1944. I’m sure we could concoct the fucking algorithms for that, too.”