As the scheduled time for President Obama’s address on Syria came and went yesterday, reporters in the Rose Garden could see him through the Oval Office windows, talking on the telephone.
He was probably talking to political guru David Axelrod about the latest polls — just before he demanded that Congress rise above partisanship.
You don’t have to be a cynic to scoff at Obama’s claim that his sudden decision to seek approval for a military strike shows his loyalty to the Constitution. In truth, it is all about saving his own bacon. He talked himself into no-man’s land and is now desperately seeking an escape hatch.
Boxed in from the left and right, at home and abroad, heckled as a hypocrite and a flip-flopper, he didn’t have a single friend, let alone a coalition. So he kicked the can to Congress and challenged its members to make the unpopular decision he’s not willing to make as commander in chief.
The 11th-hour reversal is a Gilda Radner moment — “Never mind!” She did it as comedy; Obama does it as farce.
For the last week, White House aides have engaged in relentless fear mongering about the dangers of inaction and delay. Even yesterday, Obama warned that Bashar al-Assad is a global menace, said the use of chemical weapons is a moral outrage that must be punished and warned that potential proliferation is a grave threat to our national security and our allies.
And then he said . . . But.
Or, as the professor in chief put it, he’s decided a military strike is necessary and that he has the authority to launch one, but insists a strike “is not time-sensitive.”
“It will be effective tomorrow, next week or one month from now,” he declared. That silly, happy talk bears no relation to the reality that Syrian troops were said to be moving chemical weapons to protected sites even as Obama spoke. Whatever plans our military has cannot possibly survive a delay of weeks or months.
Obama’s casual abandonment of the urgency that Secretary of State John Kerry had articulated so forcefully Friday also happens to be convenient for him. The president’s failure to summon Congress for an emergency session is surely tied to the fact that Obama leaves Tuesday for a European summit and won’t return to Washington until next Friday.
He couldn’t very well demand a congressional debate on what he describes as a crucial test of Western values while he’s out of the country. Note that he didn’t think the issue was important enough for him to skip the international gabfest.
So, in the end, he concocted a Rubik’s Cube strategy designed to make him look both tough and principled while also protecting him politically: Preen about morality, delay action and hand the responsibility to somebody else. That way he’ll have a handy scapegoat if it all goes south.
If Congress, like Britain’s Parliament, says no, well then, what can Obama do? And if Congress says yes, then he’s not alone in the foxhole.
In its own way, his strategic concoction perfectly reflects who and what he is as a president — clever without being wise. He’s got an answer for everything and a solution for nothing.
Remember, Obama put himself in this no-win situation by passively watching the bodies pile up in Syria. His declaration of a “red line” on chemical weapons aimed to make him look resolute but it amounted, as Sen. John McCain said, to a green light on wholesale slaughter with every other kind of weapon.
So it was no surprise that Assad, in a fight to the death, crossed the red line. In fact, reports say he has done it more than a dozen times.
He did it without fear of the United States and has been proven right. Indeed, Obama’s statement last week that the military strike he had planned would only be a “shot across the bow” would have been a pointless provocation. Assad would have survived and rallied his troops and jihadists against the US “invasion.”
Now that Obama has blinked on even a limited strike, Assad will claim victory, secure that he’s free to keep the slaughter going.
The rebels and the innocents will have to look elsewhere for a savior.
You can also bet that Iran, North Korea and all other genocidal maniacs celebrated the president’s punt. They know, better than he, that abdication of leadership is not easily reversed.
At one point yesterday, Obama noted that: “Out of the ashes of world war, we built an international order and enforced the rules that gave it meaning.”
He’s right about that but seems not to understand that the global order is crumbling largely because America is no longer willing to enforce the rules.
Or, more to the point, that America’s current president is no longer willing to enforce the rules.