Folks at the National Review and the Wall Street Journal are so goddamn desperate for a war in the Middle East—any war, really—that they’re up for anything. Anything! Even the “unbelievably small” dose of high explosives being promised by John Kerry.* Hey, World War I started with a single death! Know hope!
It is the hope of the right wing that blowing up some shit in Syria will cause the Syrians, and more to the point, the Iranians, to act “aggressively”—that is, to refuse to do what we tell them to—requiring us to, very reluctantly, use the only kind of language those people understand—leading, in the best of all possible worlds, to decades of constant crisis.
The agony of the right is predictable, I guess, but what’s surprising to me is the agony of the moderates. It’s truly amazing to see the tizzy virtually the entire American establishment has been thrown into by the possibility that the American people might reject the idea that they have the duty to support the killing of a handful of people they’ve never met whenever the President damn well feels like it. Ross Douthat, my favorite whipping boy, outlines the horror to come if we fail to rise to the challenge:
It is to President Obama’s great discredit that he has staked this credibility on a vote whose outcome he failed to game out in advance. But if he loses that vote, the national interest as well as his political interests will take a tangible hit: for the next three years, American foreign policy will be in the hands of a president whose promises will ring consistently hollow, and whose ability to make good on his strategic commitments will be very much in doubt.
President Obama has made a staggering bad decision to propose this attack on Syria, a country that offers us no threat, whose civil war will not be disturbed one whit by our actions. John Kerry seems to have been driven half-mad by the desire to play Great White Father to a nation that has not the slightest use for him, while Susan Rice has shown that she will lie as eagerly as Condoleezza. These people richly deserve the rebuke I hope Congress will deliver them.
UPDATE
It would be “amusing” if the Russian option, allowing Syria to hand over its chemical weapons to athird party, will actually bear fruit. The Administration certainly doesn’t deserve such a break, but maybe it will get it, transforming a dreary fiasco into an upbeat farce. Hey, I’ll drink to that!
*Both Paul Waldman and James Fallows desperately defend Kerry’s thoroughly banal statement—“he didn’t really mean it!” “He was just sayin’!” Guys, he’s the secretary of state. He’s supposed to be, you know, competent.
