Maybe Obama planned all of this. Maybe he’s doing “something” that amounts to nothing to appease our various allies who want us to do “something,” knowing that, when we actually start to do something, they’ll decide that that wasn’t the something they wanted us to do—it wasn’t that mystical, elusive something that solves all our problems at no cost without creating any new ones. Maybe implicit threats to do “something” will make people realize that intervention won’t solve all our problems and will give us massive new ones instead.
But one can wonder, and one can worry. We don’t have any wars any more, and that can be frustrating to the foreign policy establishment, especially Secretary of State John Kerry, who sounds suspiciously like a man who wants to be a hero. Beyond those experts, there’s the whole military/industrial/journalistic complex, frothing at the mouth at the thought of a new “cause.” Without crises, who needs all these brilliant experts anyway? Obama may feel that it’s worth killing a few dozen Arabs, who probably would have gotten themselves killed anyway, to give all these Beltway geniuses a new sandbox to play in. That’s the theory. Or, rather, that’s a theory. But the more the president talks, the less I like what I hear.*
Afterwords
If only the real world consisted entirely of talking heads, with no countries or peoples other than our own! Unfortunately, that’s not the case. “Meaningful” intervention in Syria, whatever that might be or might accomplish, would surely irritate Russia and Iran, in some measure. This, of course, is the dream of the right wing, who want a new Cold War. Syria is pretty small potato as crises go, a brushfire in the desert that will ultimately burn itself out. But not if you blow on it hard enough!
*The president recently told NPR that “we can take limited, tailored approaches, not getting drawn into a long conflict, not a repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about – but if we are saying in a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across the bow saying, stop doing this, that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term, and may have a positive impact on our national security over the long term and may have a positive impact in the sense that chemical weapons are not used again on innocent civilians.” “Clear, decisive, but very limited”! The sad thing is, Obama sounds like he believes it, sounds as if he believes that if you talk nonsense in solemn tones, people won’t notice that you’re talking nonsense. In fact, if the president does launch attacks, they surely will not resolve anything, but will simply set the stage for endless demands for something more decisive, and less limited. But, hey, if you keep this up long enough, it will be someone else’s responsibility.
