It is the cruelest of ironies that President Barack Obama’s legacy in the Middle East—a signature issue for many U.S. presidents—now lies in the hands of two of his most intractable adversaries: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
It’s cruel because saving Syria, resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, and achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace seem well beyond the president’s capacity—even if he boasted the support of willing and trusting partners. And it’s ironic because Obama set out not to preside over catastrophes in the Middle East but to transform the region for the better. He now risks being the president on whose watch it all became so much worse.
I don’t see why it’s “cruel” that the President can’t achieve the absurdly high goals that Miller sets for him. No president could. And in fact as the article progresses, Miller acknowledges that very fact. “Yet the ‘who lost the Middle East?’ debate is really a silly one—the region was never Obama’s to lose.” But then, after getting off his high horse, he gets right back on. The president should have been “proactive.” When you’re proactive, apparently, everything always turns out all right.
Over and over again, Miller implies that everything is all Obama’s fault, before backing away—and then returning to the assault once more. Should Obama have intervened in Syria? According to Miller, “I’ve supported the president’s risk-averse approach on Syria, largely because the endgame the United States wants—a liberal, secular, pro-Western Syria—is beyond America’s capacity to achieve from the outside and not worth the risk of a more muscular intervention that would require the United States to be on the inside.”
So Obama was right? Well, maybe not.
History may prove much less sympathetic, however. Syria’s isn’t Obama’s Rwanda. But the killing—and the passive reaction of the entire international community—will raise inevitable questions about what more could have been done.
It won’t help the president’s case that key members of his national security team recommended doing more and he overruled them. It may not be remembered that “more” would barely have altered the military arc of the conflict.
Miller unsurprisingly cites Ronald Reagan as a “proactive” president. In 1983, Reagan sent U.S. troops into Lebanon on a “peacekeeping” mission. A terrorist attack killed 242 U.S. Marines, the Corps’ bloodiest day since World War II. Reagan took the Marines out and kept them out. That’s the kind of “proactive President” I can get behind.
