The bleak question raised by the civil war in Syria is this: How much do we Americans care about a conflict that has already cost 70,000 lives and presumably will cost tens of thousands more in the months to come?
The answer is, clearly, we don’t care very much.
What we do care about, apparently, is whether some of those people have been injured or killed by chemical weapons.
As a humanitarian concern — and Syria is the most serious humanitarian crisis on Earth at this moment — the way the deaths and injuries happen doesn’t matter. A person killed by a regime desperately trying to stay alive is dead whether the instrument of his death was gas or a gun or a machete.
It matters to President Obama. He has said, and his people have said, repeatedly, that any use of chemical weapons crosses a red line. It would be, as he put it, a “game changer.”
Yesterday his secretaries of defense and state said Syria has crossed that red line with the use of sarin gas in its deadly civil war. The game has changed.
But from what to what?
The clear implication of Obama’s words was that the United States would intervene militarily in Syria. He spoke them to deter the Assad regime — to say, in effect, You do this and we will squash you like a bug. Don’t do this, or else.
Assad has likely done it. And now, in the fifth year of Obama’s presidency, we enter the most significant time of testing for his world leadership.
For remember, Obama has been personally defied. He didn’t have to establish this red line. He could’ve weaseled his way around it, double-talked it. Indeed, his administration has basically been doing so for months, since in truth we knew the chemical weapons had been used earlier this year.
That weaseling impulse was the first thing that came to the fore yesterday. After Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said flatly that chemical weapons had been used, a White House spokesman declared that more information was needed. “We are currently pressing for a comprehensive United Nations investigation that can credibly evaluate the evidence and establish what took place,” Caitlin Hayden said.
This was — is — bizarre. The White House had already released a letter to congressional leaders saying chemical weapons have been used. Then it says, in effect, we can’t say for sure?
Of course they’ve been used. There are physical samples of damaged tissue that can’t be faked.
The only question, apparently, is whether the rebels might’ve used them rather than Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
But is that really a question? If it were the rebels, which is highly unlikely, they would’ve stolen the weapons from Assad’s trove — and the existence of that trove is itself a violation of international law, which has outlawed any stockpiling of sarin.
Obama defenders are already archly making mordant references to the Bush administration’s belief that Iraq had possessed WMDs. But this is something else. Sarin has been used in Syria. The only question now is: What is to be done about it?
Obama’s predicament is real. The Syrian regime is awful, but the rebels don’t look like a walk in the park either. The end result of a post-Assad Syria is likely to be another government hostile to the United States and Israel.
Still, now Obama finds himself where every president over the past 20 years has — having said something uncompromising that he must stand behind or risk having his words seem empty and the resolve of the United States seem nonexistent.
When the first President George Bush went unheeded by Saddam Hussein, he eventually launched the Gulf War. When President Bill Clinton went unheeded by Slobodan Milosevic, he launched the air war over Kosovo.
When President George W. Bush went unheeded by the Taliban, he went into Afghanistan; unheeded by Saddam, as his father had been, he went into Iraq.
Now it’s Obama’s turn.
And the key problem isn’t even Syria. It’s Syria’s ally, Iran.
The mullahs are watching. If Obama can’t find it in himself to act against Assad — perhaps through the pretense that we just don’t know enough — the unheeded red line in Syria will turn into a green light for a nuclear Tehran.
And then we reap the whirlwind.