WarSclerotic

The low point this week in the growing mockery of the Obama administration’s dithering over what to do about the Syrian government’s apparent nerve gas attack on its civilian population was described by Mark Steyn: “In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action ‘just muscular enough not to get mocked.'”

Such a military strike against the Assad regime in Syria might be described as the pinprick to end all pinpricks as far as military campaigns go. The previous record-holder of distinction in the category of one-day “feel better” attacks was Bill Clinton. Pressured to respond to the American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in the summer of 1998 which killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans, Clinton answered with a one-day launch of cruise missiles aimed at an empty al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The cruise missile attacks proved a solid distraction for a few days from Clinton’s ongoing troubles resulting from his lies about his relationship with young White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Last week Obama seemed to be auditioning for a future role in a production of Hamlet. To attack or not to attack? And how small can the response be? Obama seemed to want to point out to whomever was paying attention that he was unhappy with Syria. They had disappointed him, and even more so, presumably, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, the current and former secretaries of state, each of whom had lauded Syrian President Bashar Assad’s peaceful intentions and reasonableness in the recent past.

Obama felt a need to respond to the chemical weapons attack, given his prior public comments about red lines in any attacks by Assad using weapons of mass destruction. Chemical weapon attacks by the Assad regime had already occurred since that red line was supposedly established, but not with as lethal a result as in the past few weeks. The president had ignored his own red lines after the prior attacks, but with more than 1,300 dead from the most recent strike, this latest outrage seemed to require his attention, at least for a few days.

The president and his aides were talking to journalists to make sure no one got the wrong idea about the goals or scope of the coming Syrian campaign. After all, Obama was the president who had campaigned that the Iraq war was a mistake for many years, and as president had pulled out all U.S. forces from that country, without seeming regard for what was left behind after their departure. After a brief surge in Afghanistan, the war he had described, when criticizing the Iraq intervention, as the more important one, he put a timetable in place to pull out there as well. In Libya, to forestall a supposed looming humanitarian disaster, he had, by his own words “led from behind,” in an effort to prevent President Moammar Gadhafi from destroying rebel forces and regime opponents. But the near 120,000 Syrians dead in two years in a much larger humanitarian killing zone in that country, the million-plus refugees outside the country, the many millions more displaced within the country — none of this motivated the president to act against Assad until the most recent chemical weapons attack.

For a president who criticized the Iraq intervention for lacking U.N. endorsement, who criticized President George W. Bush for “going it alone” in Iraq without international partners, who criticized his predecessor for not seeking a declaration of war from Congress and for relying on bad intelligence as a basis for the attack (a rush to judgment), everything about his Syrian response suggested a heavy dose of hypocrisy. Bush, after all, had multiple U.N. resolutions on Iraq to rely on, including one passed just months before the attack, had 46 nations in his “coalition of the willing,” had received support from both houses of Congress for a military intervention if required. He also had 80 percent public approval in the U.S, for his actions when the war began.

Obama will have, it seems, at most one international partner in his effort, France. For the first time since 1782, the British House of Commons would not endorse military actions proposed by its prime minister. As Roger Cohen in The New York Times described the vote:

“As Cameron acknowledged, the vote by 285 votes to 272, with 30 defections from his own Tory party, contained an irrefutable message: ‘It is clear to me that the British Parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action.'”

It is unclear how much the British vote reflected anger with Obama for his consistent coolness toward the British government and Britain itself since he took office, and how much was a residue of anger over the supposed mistake of Britain’s then-Prime Minister Tony Blair choosing to follow the lead of Bush on Iraq back in 2003. In response to the British vote, the president announced on Saturday that he would delay military action until Congress met to vote on this, though he indicated he could move ahead without congressional support if it was not forthcoming, which is unlikely.

The British vote was not the first time U.S. Middle East action has met resistance. In the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003, the Turkish parliament turned down by a narrow margin a resolution allowing the U.S. to use Turkish soil to stage operations in the upcoming war, which would have allowed allied forces to squeeze Saddam Hussein and his army from both north and south. Of course, in Turkey, if you lose a contested vote in parliament by 14 votes, it usually means you did not try hard enough (that is, pass around enough money to get the job done). U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell could not be bothered even visiting Turkey in the run-up to the vote to try to sway the parliamentarians.

American public opinion surveys conducted this week suggest a distinct lack of enthusiasm for U.S. military intervention in Syria, with 40% opposed, 37% in favor, and 23% undecided. It is likely that if Obama gives the order to launch a few cruise missiles, and if Congress votes to endorse it, that support level will rise, as Americans always rally around the flag in such conflicts, at least at the start.

But in any case, such an attack will occur with virtually no international allies, no support from the U.N. or any other international organization (such as NATO or the Arab League), weak support for action at home, and probably most critically, no clear goals on what it is trying to achieve. On Friday, the president seemed to be arguing that any action was designed to send the very limited message that chemical weapons use by nations violated international norms, so some response was required: “‘It is not in the national security interests of the United States to ignore clear violations of these kinds of international norms, and the reason is because there are a whole host of international norms out there that are very important to us,’ the president said in the Cabinet Room during a meeting with leaders from Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.”

There are, of course, a lot of ways to respond to a nation that has committed violations of international norms, and Obama seems to be signaling that his preferred option will be very limited: an operation lasting a day or two, with no boots on the ground, not aimed at accomplishing regime change (nor presumably even to alter the course of the fighting between government forces and the various rebel groups attempting to overthrow Assad). The several days of messaging also seem to have given Assad time to move weapons around to protect them from areas likely to be attacked, and to move human shields (prisoners) to areas likely to be targeted.

Obama, whether deliberately or not, seemed to be saying that he needed to do something, however small and inconsequential, so as not to look foolish and hypocritical for not responding at all. But he was also messaging that he has no taste for this fight. By keeping the response small, he hoped to minimize any potential blowback against the U.S. or its allies from Syria or its allies Hezbollah and Iran. By conducting operations for only a day or two, he also hoped to insulate himself politically, particularly from critics on the Left, who are as unhappy with him now for taking unilateral steps over Syria as they (and he) were when they fiercely attacked Bush for invading Iraq in 2003.

If he had his choice, the president would much rather be visiting some university campus, to campaign for some new vital spending plan, and for higher taxes on “rich folks” who can afford to pay a little more to cover the cost of his new initiatives. This is safe ground for the president, with his appeals sure to be reported in a friendly fashion by an ever more compliant national media. Foreign policy and military operations, on the other hand, are just too messy and unpredictable for this president to do anything more than preen from above the clouds.