This is embarrassing:
Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Obama’s fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to the New York Times that Obama’s initial statement had been unprepared, unscripted, and therefore unserious.
The next day Jay Carney said precisely the opposite: “Red line” was intended and deliberate.
Which is it? Who knows? Perhaps Obama used the term last August to look tough and sound like a real world leader, never expecting that Syria would do something so crazy. He would have it both ways: sound decisive but never have to deliver.
I wondered if President Obama had a Russian guarantee to make Assad behave before he issued the red line:
As a matter of curiosity, did we know that Russia had Assad's guarantee before we warned Assad not to use or move his chemical weapons?
It's a silly thing to say that use of chemical weapons that cause a score of deaths is a trigger to intervene in a war that has claimed close to 80,000 lives the old fashioned way.
Seriously, did we intervene in the Iran-Iraq War on Iran's side when Iraq used chemical weapons on Iranians? One chemical casualties were dwarfed by conventional deaths. And two, the act of chemical weapons use wasn't by itself a matter of national interest.
Instead of simply saying that we will act in our interests, and that chemical weapons use is merely one factor of whether we should intervene more forcefully, the President doubled down on the validity of the red line. He simply increased the level of proof he wants, as if this is a replay of the pre-Iraq War debate on Saddam's WMD status:
Obama said that he needed certainty about the crossing of the red line to keep the “international community” behind him. This is absurd. The “international community” is a fiction, especially in Syria. Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah are calling the shots.
Nor, he averred, could he act until he could be sure of everything down to the “chain of custody” of the sarin gas.
What is this? CSI: Damascus? It’s a savage civil war. The antagonists don’t exactly stand down for forensic sampling.
The problem is that the chemical weapons issue in Syria is only a proliferation issue for us. We don't want terrorists who hate us to get them from Assad's arsenal. But an administration that championed Responsibility to Protect over Libya can hardly admit that it doesn't really have an interest in stopping Assad from killing civilians with a gruesome (in our eyes--not Syrian eyes-or Iraqi) weapon if the price to do so would be too high. And after a decade of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, virtually anything above zero American deaths might be too high.
And we may have relied too much on Russian assurances of Assad's behavior. Russia issued the guarantee on our red line, it seems. Is there a warranty?
