{"id":6367,"date":"2013-08-22T10:47:42","date_gmt":"2013-08-22T17:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6367"},"modified":"2013-08-22T10:47:42","modified_gmt":"2013-08-22T17:47:42","slug":"rhetoric-running-on-empty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/rhetoric-running-on-empty\/","title":{"rendered":"Rhetoric Running on Empty"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO’s The Corner<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The latest disclosure \u2014 and the most grave \u2014 of the Assad regime\u2019s supposed deployments of chemical weapons puts the West in general and the U.S. in particular in an untenable position.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By all accounts,\u00a0if<\/em>\u00a0the evidence proves to be legitimate (and given the nature of these militias that could be a big \u201cif,\u201d given that the losing side always seeks some sort of strategy for winning Western air support without much gratitude afterwards \u2014 cf. the Libyans), Assad has passed a redline. He should be deserving of concerted multilateral-sponsored action of the sort that would start with no-fly-zones and escalate accordingly.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0there are problems with such a humanitarian intervention (well beyond the now stale assertions that Assad was a \u201creformer\u201d in the eyes of our past and present secretaries of state, and worth visiting in the mind of Nancy Pelosi during the Iraq War, and worth talking to and engaging with in the 2008 campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama) \u2014 and unfortunately they are almost all of the Obama administration\u2019s own making.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s rhetorical quiver is empty. After tough talk about boots on the ground and the good war in Afghanistan, deadlines to Iran, and redlines to Syria, all of which proved sorta\/kinda pipe dreams, there are no more \u201cmake no mistake about\/let me be perfectly clear\/game-changer\/I\u2019m not kidding\u201d arrows. Assad knows that, and the world knows it as well. In other words, another Obama speech will earn guffaws.<\/p>\n

But the time for intervention, if one thought it would preclude the sort of devilish attack that may have occurred, was long ago, when the opposition was not so clearly dominated by al-Qaedists and their sympathizers, the Assad regime in the heady days of the Arab Spring was tottering, and the notion was preventing carnage, not post facto reacting to it.<\/p>\n

In sum, not to do something about the latest violation of our pink lines would green-light Assad and others to do whatever they wished (or indeed even to do more than they wished on the principle that adding humiliation of the U.S. to their aggression was of some strategic and psychic value as well). Assad also knows there is no going back now. In defeat, if he were lucky, nothing would remain other than a dismal walled compound in Tehran. And so he will fight barbarously to the finish.<\/p>\n

Yet to intervene now will require a steady hand, and, of course, presidential engagement of the sort we have not seen in Afghanistan, Benghazi, or Egypt: shuttle diplomacy with our NATO and Gulf allies, such as they are, reaching \u201cacross the aisle\u201d to senior Republican senators and statesmen, adroit handling of Turkey, skillful U.N. gymnastics, a muzzle on the sort of idiotic remarks about jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood that a Clapper or Brennan is capable of, no photo ops around the TV console between card games, and a confident military in the age of sequestration \u2014 all impossible for a commander-in-chief photo-oping from the back nine or absorbed with the latest \u201cthey did it\u201d strategy for the upcoming election.<\/p>\n

I doubt after the diplomatic double-cross in Libya (in which we asked for no-fly zones and humanitarian aid and ended up offering lead-from-behind ground support to the rebels), a once humiliated Russia will risk such a loss of face a second time, well apart from its own strategic interests in keeping Assad, and in the age of reset increasingly being against whatever we are for, even in cases of seemingly common concerns.<\/p>\n

All of the above hypotheticals and diplomatic nuances would not matter to a Churchill, Truman, or Reagan. They would size up the humanitarian crisis, grasp the strategic consequences of legitimizing the use of WMD, weigh the prior rhetorical investment of the U.S. in warning against what apparently is now happening, and craft an air strategy that might stop the violence without pulling U.S. ground troops into the mess \u2014 and act with dispatch and moral confidence.<\/p>\n

And now? Enough said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO’s The Corner The latest disclosure \u2014 and the most grave \u2014 of the Assad regime\u2019s supposed deployments of chemical weapons puts the West in general and the U.S. in particular in an untenable position.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[127],"tags":[249,1033,1055],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1EH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6525,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syria-postmortem\/","url_meta":{"origin":6367,"position":0},"title":"Syria Postmortem","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 I think the so-called Syrian crisis is working out as most anticipated: 1) In about a year or so Assad and Putin will announce that they \u201cthink\u201d they might have in theory rounded up a lot of the WMD, and will soon make\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6483,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syria-in-a-nutshell\/","url_meta":{"origin":6367,"position":1},"title":"Syria in a Nutshell","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 We are contemplating going to war in Syria to help the opposition a lot and to hurt Assad some, or to help the opposition some and hurt Assad a lot, or to hurt Assad some and help the opposition some, or to force\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":902,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/christians-jihadists-and-the-fate-of-syria\/","url_meta":{"origin":6367,"position":2},"title":"Christians, Jihadists, and the Fate of Syria","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Stonegate Institute What is the alternative to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria? A simple if indirect way to find out is to consider which groups in Syria are especially for or against Assad \u2014 and why. Christian minorities, who, at 10% of the Syrian population, have the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6489,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-charade-can-go-on-and-on-and-on\/","url_meta":{"origin":6367,"position":3},"title":"The Charade Can Go On — and On and On . . .","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner So far in the Syrian charade, Bashar Assad has won de facto permission to be a legitimate ruler negotiating with superpowers, while promising to kill thousands more by blowing them up, shelling them, and shooting them without \u201cobscene\u201d chemical weapons. Vladimir Putin controls\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Foreign Policy"","block_context":{"text":"Foreign Policy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/foreign-policy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/9384701499_3a835e687b-300x200.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6417,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/now-what-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":6367,"position":4},"title":"Now What?","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 3, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online What are the president\u2019s strategic objectives in the present mess? Does he know? There are four general strategic options \u2014 predicated on the political fact that either the Congress will approve the operation or that the Obama administration will ignore\u00a0it\u00a0if\u00a0it doesn\u2019t, and that\u00a0Obama\u00a0is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":924,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syrian-ironies\/","url_meta":{"origin":6367,"position":5},"title":"Syrian Ironies","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The more Bashar Assad butchers Syrian dissidents, the more the world community expresses outrage \u2014 while it does little to stop the bloodletting. Why? Ironies on top of ironies 1.\u00a0The politics of intervention. Republicans might seem the most likely to push for an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6367"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6368,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6367\/revisions\/6368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}