The key problem facing President Obama on Syria is . . . President Obama.
He has backed himself into a corner in which he is profoundly uncomfortable. Because he declared the use of chemical weapons a “red line,” and since Syria has now used them in an astonishingly brazen fashion, he must strike or appear weak at best and amoral at worst. And he surely will strike.
But we also know the president has expressed little confidence in his public life or in the years preceding his entry into politics that large-scale US military action can be a profound force for good.
Why would he? Barack Obama studied political science in college in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The conventional wisdom of the time was that almost every American intervention after World War II had been self-defeating, short-sighted, corrupt or immoral — and there’s no evidence Obama ever dissented from that conventional wisdom.
It’s highly unlikely a person with his ideological pedigree supported the US invasions of Grenada (in 1983) or Panama (in 1989), or the American effort against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. (Only 18 percent of the Democrats in the Senate voted for that war in 1991.)
And of course, his triumph over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries was based in part on the fact that he had opposed the war in Iraq while she had voted for it.
He did support the ouster of the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, and eight years later, he did order a surge of troops in Afghanistan as president to try and turn the tide against a resurgent Taliban. But his discomfort with his own surge was such that he declared its end-date even as he began it, thus undercutting his own effort.
He also agreed to US involvement in the NATO air effort to help oust Moammar Khadafy from Libya in 2011. But he was discomfited by this as well and allowed nations with less powerful militaries and less experience to dominate — thus provoking the notorious anonymous comment from within his own White House that Obama was “leading from behind.”
There is a deep strain in American history, dating back to George Washington’s farewell address, that this country stay away from foreign adventures. But this tradition held that America needed to keep itself at a remove from the depradations of the Old World because we were pure and principled and the countries of Europe were impure and corrupt.
That is not the tradition from which Obama comes. His tradition holds that United States intervention after World War II was almost entirely impure and corrupt, that the projection of US power causes more problems than it solves both at home and abroad.
In an important article the September issue of Commentary, the magazine I edit, Elliott Abrams describes the president’s view thus: “American leadership is a dangerous narcotic, one that can make us feel good for a while but will in the end bring tragedy to us and to many others around the world. Obama’s task is to explain this to us and, using the powers of office, keep us away from this drug for eight years and diminish our capacity to use it when he is gone.”
If this is a just description, and I believe it is, one can see why Syria is such a hard case for him.
If you believe America is and has been a force for good, then projecting military power on a large scale becomes mainly a practical problem: Can you do it effectively? How? What are the problems likely to be? Will the reward be worth the cost?
But if you share the ideological mindset of Obama and his ilk, then the projection of US power in Syria poses not practical questions but moral ones. Are you going to end up one of the bad guys?
And if you don’t end up one of the bad guys, maybe that will mean you were wrong to think all those other guys before you were bad — since they acted on the same grounds you just did.