It’s a mark, I think, of how little the American people actually care about foreign policy that it’s treated as a form of political theater, where the President strikes heroic poses with the implicit assumption that he’ll never actually to follow through on his threats. Yet over and over again, on both Iran and Syria, the President ends up devoting an endless amount of time saying, over and over again, “I meant what I said, damn it,” followed by, “well, that isn’t what I said.” It’s almost as if semantic quibbling were preferred to the actual pursuit of America’s (limited) interests.
Afterwords
On the other hand, why is Syrian president Bashar al-Assad so dumb as to raise the possibility of the use of chemical weapons? Didn’t he notice that when Saddam used them against Iran he lost? Perhaps it’s simply the one stupid thing he hasn’t tried yet.
UPDATE
Slate’s Josh Voorhees actually bothers to do some legwork, so to speak, on the matter, here. (I’m not sure this link will remain valid, so if you don’t see the head Where Is Obama’s Real Red Line for Syria?, root around a little.)
