With Syria, has the liberal mind run up against the inherent limits of its naivety? There's only one solution to the Syria carnage if your concern is to protect the 'innocent', and even that solution at best would probably only have a 50/50 chance of long term success given endemic cultural, sectarian and extremist problems that plague the Mideast - and that solution is to do to Syria what Bush did to Iraq - except, unlike Bush, actually have a post war plan this time that calls for let's say a ten year occupation that forces secular democracy and responsible governance on the bloody awful place. Now of course no one would ever agree to this and the US military, what with sequestration and general war fatigue, is probably in no position to make it happen regardless - but here's the problem for liberals, whereas conservatives can recognize it's not gonna happen while still retaining a faith and belief in the US military's ability to effect such a thing - liberals, trapped behind the irrational wall of their naive idealism, cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the ugly truth, and no one's denying that it is a very ugly truth: that only a great power bringing to bear a righteous violence can make happen the good they long for. That's unacceptable to them - and so you get tokens and rhetoric and wishful thinking and then a begging to the media to cover up the fact that you are totally full of shit [see Libya/Benghazi].
So what's Obama thinking here? That the conceit of 'responsibility to protect' will be invalidated, shown to be the sham of shallow intellectualism that it is if he fails to respond in some way to this provocation? Or is he thinking that if he doesn't do something now Assad will use gas again, and maybe it's a worse event that forces Obama to step in in a much deeper way than he quite obviously is prepared to accept? The former argument is quite delusional, flat out idiotic; the latter, on the other hand, although flawed and highly problematic and probably doomed to failure, is at least somewhat logical and realistic in its pretensions.
Or is it that Obama is simply worried about his reputation - that if he fails to act and another gassing happens, he'll be blamed for it and his presidency, if it isn't already, will be a shambles, essentially over?
Obama came into office scornful of American power and consequently set about sending a message of deliberate weakness and apology to the wide world, basically agreeing with our enemies that America was indeed an awful place but promising that he, having acknowledged his agreement with them, could make it all better. Therefore, when the putative Arab Spring came, Obama was ideologically predisposed to utterly misunderstand it and fail abysmally in response to it. Alternatively, Israel, not ashamed of itself the way Obama is of America and therefore a great believer in power and the value of a finely honed military, understood perfectly from the very beginning what the Arab Spring was - the coming of chaos and violent upheaval. A wise American leader would have seen it too and acted accordingly. For all his intellectual gifts, Obama is just another delusional liberal flailing blindly at a cold, hard world that has refused as legal tender his fantasy.
