“He kept us out of Syria!” sounds like faint praise indeed for an American president, but it’s an encomium one can no longer utter in good conscience regarding Barack “the Disappointer” Obama. The only pleasure one can take in this latest administration folly—and it’s grim indeed—is how gracelessly the administration has gone about announcing and explaining its latest foreign policy gaffe. Syrian strongman Bashar Hafez al-Assad has, it seems, crossed a red line, of sorts, in a fashion sufficiently irksome to merit a response, largely undefined, with no particular purpose that anyone wishes to speak of, to demonstrate that Uncle Sam means business, in some as yet unspecified fashion.
Speaking at an August 20 press conference, the President had this to say:
But the point that you [a reporter] made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just concern Syria; it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people.
We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.*
Got that? A whole bunch of chemical weapons being moved around or being utilized would be an equation changer. Of sorts.
According to the Wall Street Journal’s Adam Entous, what really changed Obama’s equation was pressure from Middle Eastern allies like Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who have somehow decided that Assad remaining in power is a win for Iran. Well, doing these nations a favor, when we can do so without hurting ourselves, is a good idea, but getting further involved in the Middle East is a bad one. Obama’s excellent Libyan adventure hasn’t been quite as much fun as the president expected, and the deeper one gets in the Muslim heartland, the higher the stakes are likely to go.
Back in 2006,Christian Alfonsi described in his excellent book Circle in the Sand, how the decision of the first Bush Administration to agree to station troops in Saudi Arabia to protect the Saudis from the possible future wrath of Saddam Hussein following the first Gulf War led directly to both the birth of al-Qaeda and, ultimately, 9/11. This was in fact well known to the second Bush Administration, though not to the American people. But now, it seems, here we go again.
What is most depressing about this latest equation change is the evidence it brings of the persistence of “liberal interventionism” at the highest levels, including former President Bill Clinton, who should stick to cigars, and Secretary of State Bill Kerry, who should stick to wind-surfing. Like so many, on the “left” and the right, both Bills, and so many others, babble incessantly of “credibility,” which in these cases means doing something stupid now to prove that you will do something even more stupid in the future, in the hope that this first folly will preclude your having to commit the second, greater stupidity. According to Adam Entous, the big catchphrase around the White House Situation Room these days is “Superpowers don’t bluff,” which is to say “Superpowers are afraid of being called ‘chicken’.”
*The president seems to have been talked to obsessing about chemical weapons in Syria by, yes, Benjamin Netanyahu.
