{"id":6429,"date":"2013-09-06T15:52:40","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T22:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6429"},"modified":"2013-09-06T15:52:40","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T22:52:40","slug":"if-it-wasnt-syria-it-would-have-been-something-else","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/if-it-wasnt-syria-it-would-have-been-something-else\/","title":{"rendered":"If It Wasn’t Syria, It Would Have Been Something Else"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

It is very\u00a0possible that the president will not obtain a join authorization to bomb Syria; if he chooses to go ahead and attack anyway, Obama will incite a constitutional crisis\u2014the first time in history that a president has decided to go to war against the declared wishes of Congress. The public and the courts will adjudicate the legality of that act, and it would be contentious. \u00a0<\/p>\n

So the corner that Obama has painted himself into is now inescapable. Defying Congress will put the country into a Watergate\/Monicagate mess. Not doing anything will confirm the administration\u2019s impotence and only enhance Russia, Iran, Assad, China, Islamists, and almost anyone else who does not like the U.S. Doing something small, with or without congressional approval, will be looked upon as a cynical waste of human lives to restore Obama\u2019s credibility, the sort of craven, immoral political act that a younger Obama made a career out of mocking. Doing something big will invite public and global outrage if only moderately successful, and doom the Obama presidency if unsuccessful.<\/p>\n

How did Obama get himself into this mess? It was bound to\u00a0happen, given his past habits. All we are seeing now is the melodramatic\u00a0fulfillment\u00a0of\u00a0vero\u00a0possumus<\/em>, lowering the rising seas, faux Corinthian columns, hope and change, the bows, the Cairo speech, and the audacity of hope. Hubris does earn Nemesis.<\/p>\n

1) His inclination is to damn straw men, blame others for his self-inflicted errors, and spike the ball when he should keep quiet and become modest (cf. the bin Laden raid). So in Syria we heard the same old, same old: A host of bad guys, here and abroad, wants to do nothing. Obama alone has the vision and moral compass to restore global and U.S. credibility through his eloquence; but the world disappointed him and is now at fault for establishing red lines that it won\u2019t enforce: He came into the world to save the world, but\u00a0the world rejected him.<\/p>\n

After five years of this, the world caught on, and sees juvenile and\u00a0narcissistic\u00a0petulance in lieu of statesmanship\u2014and unfortunately a sinister Putin takes great delight in reminding 7 billion people of this fact almost daily. In terms of geostrategic clout, Obama has nullified the power of his eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups, Putin\u00a0through\u00a0his shrewd insight and ruthless calculation of human nature, has added five where they didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

2) \u00a0Obama thinks in an untrained manner and for all the talk of erudition and education seems bored and distracted\u2014and it shows up in the most critical moments. Had he wished to stop authoritarians, prevent bloodshed and near genocide, and foster true reform in the Middle East, there were plenty of prior, but now blown occasions: a) the \u201cgood\u201d war in Afghanistan could have earned his full attention; b) the \u201cbad\u201d Iraq War was won and needed only a residual force to monitor the Maliki government and protect Iraq airspace and ensure quiet; c) the green revolution in Iran was in need of moral support; d) Qaddafi could have been continually pressured for further reform rather than bombed into oblivion; e) postwar Libya needed U.S. leadership to ensure that \u201clead from behind\u201d did not lead to the present version of Somalia and the disaster in Benghazi; e) long ago, the president could have either kept quiet about Syria or acted on his threats when Assad was tottering and the resistance was less Islamist; f) he could have warned the one vote\/one time Muslim Brotherhood early on not to do what everyone in the world knew it would surely do; g) he need not\u00a0have\u00a0issued\u00a0tough serial deadlines to Iran that we have not really enforced and probably have no intention of enforcing.<\/p>\n

Instead, Obama relied on his rhetoric and talked loosely, sloppily and inconsistently from crisis to crisis, the only common denominator being that he always took the path of least resistance and thus did nothing concretely to match his cadences. Usually to the degree he made a decision, he made things worse with empty, first-person bombast.<\/p>\n

3) Obama cannot attract top talent. Those from prior administrations who are gifted and worked for him or who were promoted by him\u2014Robert Gates, David Petraeus, Paul Volcker, Richard Holbrooke, James Mattis, Stanley McChrystal\u2014either were treated badly, not fully utilized, or ended up regretting their experience. Instead a host of mediocrities are recruited on the basis of either their partisanship, loyalty or demonstrated past lightness\u2014an Eric Holder, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Timothy Geithner, Chuck Hagel, etc.<\/p>\n

Nowhere than in the present crisis is this unfortunate trend more telling: Pro-war John Kerry has opportunistic anti-war baggage, pontificates rather than persuades, and freelances into serial embarrassments; Martin Dempsey, to his credit, cannot square the circle of being an honest man assigned to say things he knows simply cannot be true, and so pleads the military\u2019s version of the Fifth; Chuck Hagel has not recovered from the confirmation hearings, and just wishes Syria would go away; anything that a\u00a0surprisingly\u00a0quiet Joe Biden says on the crisis will probably be incoherent and incendiary, and surely contradictory of some past statement; Susan Rice astutely outsourced this crisis; Hillary Clinton whose \u201cwhat difference does it make?\u201d fingerprints are all over the Syrian and Libyan fiascos wisely got out of town ahead of the\u00a0posse.<\/p>\n

What is now the least bad choice between terrible and even more terrible alternatives? If the congressional vote is yes, the choice is cynically wasting a few American lives for a possible point, or killing lots more people for a more possible point. Not good choices.<\/p>\n

If\u00a0the\u00a0congressional vote is, as I hope, no, Obama should quietly (i.e., don\u2019t blame Congress,\u00a0the\u00a0world,\u00a0the public, etc.)\u00a0back out\u00a0of\u00a0the\u00a0bombing mode, more quietly continue the belated work of promoting a pro-Western resistance to Assad, mend fences with allies most quietly, and prepare very carefully (but without the bombast) for a real crisis on the near horizon that will need the public, the Congress, our allies, and the president\u2019s full attention and response. In our new Vienna-summit-to-Cuban-missile-crisis era of danger, I fear our enemies and rivals are digesting the Syrian misadventure and calibrating to what degree they might soon turn our present psychodrama into a real American tragedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO’s The Corner It is very\u00a0possible that the president will not obtain a join authorization to bomb Syria; if he chooses to go ahead and attack anyway, Obama will incite a constitutional crisis\u2014the first time in history that a president has decided to go to war against the declared wishes of […]<\/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":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1FH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6483,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syria-in-a-nutshell\/","url_meta":{"origin":6429,"position":0},"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":6431,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-fundamental-absence-of-seriousness\/","url_meta":{"origin":6429,"position":1},"title":"A Fundamental Absence of Seriousness","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner \u00a0 We are told hypocrisies are Obama\u2019s problem: Republicans who are usually pro-war don\u2019t support this war only because of Obama; Democrats who are usually anti-war can\u2019t support this war for Obama without being shown up as sudden pro-war hypocrites. 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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":[]},{"id":6539,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/goodbye-syria-on-to-iran\/","url_meta":{"origin":6429,"position":5},"title":"Goodbye Syria, On to Iran!","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 23, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, this is the way Syria ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper. 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