Obama must be choking on irony. This is a president, after all, who campaigned against the war in Iraq and has since proclaimed himself the war-ender, not the war-starter. He is the complete anti-Bush — thoughtful, reflective, cautious and never suggesting that he has heard from the Almighty on what to do next.
Still, Obama has so lost control of his foreign policy — if he ever had one — that he must now wait on Assad to go through with a deal the Russians, of all people, made possible. He must continue to threaten force, but the American people, Congress and, most important, the Russians will not permit it and — here’s Bush smirking again — don’t believe him. In the end — and the end could be months down the road — the Syrians may well surrender their stock of chemical weapons, but Assad has literally gotten away with murder. He gassed about 1,400 civilians, including 400 or so children, and did not pay a penalty. So much for “red lines.”
The pity of it is that, had Obama used force early on, Assad would not have dared to gas his own people. The dead and the wounded are as much a victim of U.S. weakness and vacillation as they are of Assad’s brutality — the former made the latter possible. Obama was so fixated on not being Bush, so worried about stepping into a quagmire, that he wound up losing control of the situation.
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