We are discussing what to do about Iraq. It is a pointless discussion, because in this case, only one man’s opinion matters.
His name is Barack Obama, and his opinion is that his signal foreign-policy accomplishment is having pulled the United States out of Iraq.
He is unlikely to be moved by arguments that would cause him to revisit or revise that view, especially ones in favor of ground forces made by neoconservatives whose opinions he despises.
And if President Obama isn’t moved, the American people won’t be moved.
When it comes to matters beyond our borders, one simple proposition has governed public opinion in the modern era: The American people aren’t going to care if the president doesn’t care. They’re not going to rise up and support intervention of any serious kind overseas if he doesn’t ask them to support it.
We hire the president to take care of America’s interests internationally. He’s entrusted with the tool chest of American power. He serves as commander in chief of the armed forces and manages the nation’s relations with other countries.
He supervises the military. He runs the State Department. He’s in charge of the intelligence services. He, and his staff, know more than everybody else does (as, by the way, they never tire of telling you if you know them and you try to argue with them on the details of policy).
They’re having the private conversations with foreign leaders. They’re listening in to the tapped phones. They’re seeing the drone footage and the satellite images, and they move ships and Americans in uniform around in response to them.
They know. We can only guess.
On rare occasions, presidents try to rally public opinion, but fail. Ronald Reagan tried to rally public opinion around his effort to arm the Contras in Nicaragua; the public never went for it.
Such failure is rare, because our presidents rarely ask the American people for more than they’re willing to give.
The president is the only person elected by the entirety of the American people and therefore he is, almost by definition, more in tune with the national pulse than anyone else.
Here’s what happens when presidents try to make the argument for intervention. Their supporters generally fall in line. The forceful case splits the opposition. They get their way.
George Bush the Elder split the Democratic opposition to the first Gulf War in 1991 in the Senate and received the go-ahead. The same happened with his son in 2002 when it came to Iraq.
Bill Clinton didn’t even bother to seek congressional authorization for his air war over Kosovo, in part to save his Democratic colleagues from having to bite the bullet and vote for intervention. If he had, Republicans would’ve split and he would have gotten his way.
But if the president doesn’t want to intervene, there is no countervailing force that can force his hand.
As millions were slaughtered in Rwanda, a mass movement arose arguing they should be saved. Clinton didn’t move. The mass movement didn’t have a tenth of the president’s power, and he didn’t suffer for failing to intervene.
Barack Obama clearly fretted he wouldn’t win public opinion to his side last August when he announced he was going to strike Syria.
And so, in a strange Saturday-afternoon speech, he said he would do it and he had the unilateral authority to do it — but also demanded that Congress express its support of the effort before he would act.
And then he went on vacation.
It was only two weeks ago that the president gave a major speech in which he praised himself yet again for pulling our forces out of Iraq and praising himself for his plan to do the same in Afghanistan.
Given that, it is nothing less than science-fictional to imagine he will take significant military measures to defeat the Syria-hardened extremists who have shocked the world with their lightning advance in Iraq.
We, the American people, chose him. Twice. Give him credit; Obama does what he says he’s going to do. He said he’d get us out of Iraq, notwithstanding the fact that the surge strategy had turned a defeat into a victory.
Get us out he did. And now we and the world will reap the whirlwind.
It’s not what the 4,000-plus who died there, or the 33,000-plus who were injured there, deserve for their monumental and heroic labors.
But it’s what we deserve.