Why did Obama create a red line on Syria viz WMDs if he had no intention of heeding the red line? He did the same thing with Iran when in Israel, saying he will not let them go nuclear and then stating they'll have the ability to go nuclear within a year, which is basically the same as creating a red line in time on Iran - and yet I don't believe for a second he has any intention of interceding. So why is he doing this? Sometimes I think they feel that their ability to control the media narrative is so great that they can get away with saying just about anything - and there's plenty of justification for feeling that way - but this is too important, this is too dangerous - if you're America it is absolute, unmitigated strategic folly to establish red lines and then not follow up on them - so what are they doing here? They're not idiots, they know this is unacceptable behaviour, right? I don't get it.
Maybe I've misjudged them, maybe they are planning to intervene - that'd shock the hell outta me, but who knows. I will say that Obama's idiot actions in Libya forced this conundrum on him to no small amount - you intervene in a country that is not of strategic import to us because of a humanitarian crisis that was only threatened and then because of your asinine leading from behind leave behind an Islamist shit hole that actually now is a strategic concern for us - but then when it comes to Syria where there is an actual humanitarian crisis happening in a country of palpable strategic import to us you do next to nothing - I mean he walked right into this one.
Now, don't get me wrong - to me Syria is a classic damned if you do, damned if you don't problem - there are no good answers here, it's all just degrees of bad - still, just because all the choices are bad doesn't take away the burden from the US of choosing best - but best for Obama seems to amount to nothing more than sending a message of weakness and confusion and strategic naivety that leaves many with the distinct impression that outside of lofty rhetoric, timid gestures and drones his idea of American power is quite limited indeed - it's as if his only plan here, his sole guiding motive is to remove America from the grip of being an illusory [to him] empire, to render it no longer the necessary country. Reverend Wright must feel great pride.
[I want to clarify something here - it's not impossible that Obama's approach to the Syria problem may indeed have been more or less right, I dunno - all the predicable outcomes that can be applied to given various scenarios were, are bad and it's just a question of figuring out the least bad - and so it's possible the way Obama has approached it is indeed the least bad - I dunno, and I'm not sure if anyone not privy to classified intelligence can ever really know when it comes to a problem like Syria - many conservatives believed that the only way to stop radical Islamists from coming to power should Assad fall was by getting in early, but I read several backgrounders on it that made the case that, without American troops on the ground, cherry picking a 'winner' was impossible and that there was probably no way to stop radicals from eventually gaining the upper hand - others wanted to argue that toppling Assad would be a blow to Iran and therefore we should be involved, which is true, but by doing so you would also have risked the possibility of drawing in Iraqi Shia to defend their brothers and then you've got a nasty chain of events set in motion - like I said, there are valid arguments to be made on all sides of this question so you cannot simply state outright that doing nothing was QED obviously wrong - the disaster for Obama is that a red line doesn't at all fit well with such a cautious stratagem and when you compare Syria to Libya, even if one allows that his hands off approach was per se more or less 'the right move' viz Syria, what you end up with is America looking weak and confused and misguided - and that's not a good thing. There were many reasons why Libya was a very foolish, naive venture - in some ways worse than Iraq, which is of course to stretch a point, sure, but at least Iraq actually mattered strategically to us and at least Bush, when it became clear he had made mistakes, tried to fix things - Obama just walked away from Libya as if everything was cool, nothing to see here, and the lap dog press played along - but now it has come back to haunt him - I'm guessing that's why they felt compelled to establish a red line on WMDs that they probably never had any intention to defend - after Libya doing nothing was no longer an option and they gambled Assad would never go there - well, he called your bluff and possibly he did so because he looked at Libya, not to mention Afghanistan, and concluded Obama has no stomach for a fight, he does not believe in American power - and now wha' d'ya gonna do? You get involved militarily in Syria and a regional war crests on the horizon - you can drag Iraq into this as sectarian violence starts to swell there - Hezbollah can drag in Lebanon and maybe Israel - Iran can drag in Turkey and Saudi Arabia - and god only knows what card ol' Vlad in Russia will play - but the really depressing part is, get involved or don't, it may be too late to matter either way - the worst case scenarios may already be in the pipeline - radical Islamists coming to power in Syria... Assad surviving and Iran treating this as a huge strategic victory for them, which it will be... or just a good ol' regional war that spirals into who knows what bloody direction - seems to me Obama has made some serious miscalculations here regarding what it means to be America in a very dangerous world - it's almost as if he actually believed that just being the celebrity black president was enough - ya show up, give a nice speech, the media fawns and everything falls into place - hell, I suggested several years ago that this might indeed be how the man would approach the presidency - to turn a phrase, for liberals of Obama's ilk it's almost as if they want very much to believe that the Gettysburg address won the Civil War and not the application of a brutal and relentless power... Spielberg's 'Lincoln' certainly is inclined that way... Pericles' funeral oration did not make him a great and enlightened leader, he carried that weight before rising to speak...]
