{"id":6539,"date":"2013-09-23T11:11:02","date_gmt":"2013-09-23T18:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6539"},"modified":"2013-09-23T11:11:02","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T18:11:02","slug":"goodbye-syria-on-to-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/goodbye-syria-on-to-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye Syria, On to Iran!"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, this is the way Syria ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper. We are back where we started \u2014 lots of people dying \u2014 as the crisis recedes with a high five and a sigh, rather than with America blowing some stuff up.<\/p>\n

The locus of our original outrage \u2014 99,000 Syrians lost in a brutal sectarian war \u2014\u00a0had almost nothing to do<\/a>\u00a0with Assad\u2019s alleged use of WMD. Thus the Syrian violence never could be addressed through even successful negotiations about mostly irrelevant WMD. It would have been as if, at the height of the Rwanda crisis, we had threatened to bomb an RPG depot to force the Hutus and Tutsis to continue with their machetes \u2014 then backed off, had an ongoing dialogue with Putin about such dangerous rocketry (as Rwandans continued at it with edged weapons), and called our bluff \u201cnon-stylish but smart diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

So we moved on from Syria. The U.S. continues to express outrage and so continues to allow Assad and his many enemies to kill lots of people until one side loses or wins. The only difference,\u00a0after the red lines were issued<\/a>, hyped, and forgotten, is that while Assad once was ordered to step down, he is now a legitimate talking partner in global discussions. Using WMD worked. It certainly proved a good way for Assad to show off his French-accented English and stylish haircut and suit on prime-time American television. WMD proved a far better deal than a costly new Russian air-defense system in deterring U.S. bombs.<\/p>\n

The present trajectory of endless haggling and rug-buying over WMD simply reduces the issue to its status before Obama\u2019s unwise red line \u2014 mostly one of benign neglect, and mostly supported by the proverbially \u201ctired\u201d American people. After all, Obama can say to us,\u00a0\u201cAren\u2019t you happy with me<\/a>\u00a0that I didn\u2019t do the stupid thing I promised to do?\u201d Well, yes, sort of like the relieved police suicide negotiator after the would-be bridge-jumper finally slinks down off the pylon.<\/p>\n

Obama is relieved that there is a critical but transitory moment of destiny in every crisis, real or manufactured. His own psychodramatic stare-down has long passed with his blink. It would be near impossible to work the public, the Congress, and the world back up into another melodrama. Again, because Obama never really wished to do anything in Syria other than bluster, there is no reason for him now to reopen the issue. And because Obama did not act when thousands died and he ordered Assad to go, and almost did act when WMD was used and did not, why act at all anymore? Even his critics prefer the virtual Obama.<\/p>\n

Syria has also changed. Assad is no longer losing. Iran and Hezbollah have upped the ante. The insurgents seem morally compromised. Their connection with the \u201cArab Spring\u201d is ancient history, and so is the Arab Spring itself. Iran is now talking directly to the American people in Putinesque fashion. Despite the mounting death toll, doing nothing in late 2013 will earn Obama far less condemnation than did doing nothing in 2011 or 2012. Syria is now either already lost, or impossible to sort out, or relegated to secondary consideration after all the diversionary talk about WMD.<\/p>\n

So Obama\u2019s inaction is now more attuned to political realities, here and abroad. His interventionist trial balloon exploded; the result will be that he probably won\u2019t float one again. As far as the politics go, looking weak and confused is damaging, but perhaps not as damaging as acting weakly and confusedly, which was the likely result of an \u201cunbelievably small\u201d sort of \u201cshot across the bow.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if Americans are relieved to let Syria be Syria, others crawled out of the woodwork at the sound of Obama\u2019s loud empty bluster about bombing. Why the sudden Iran charm offensive, if not that the theocracy believes it can now follow Assad\u2019s model, but by focusing on a nuclear bomb or at least the lifting of sanctions? And why is Putin suddenly in the news, as if to remind the world that he can prevent not just a reckless U.S. from doing real harm to others but, he feigns, to itself as well?<\/p>\n

Obama is probably not too concerned with any of these worries. After all, he pulled out\u00a0all the troops in Iraq<\/a>, after a brilliant two-year surge that by January 2009 had led to\u00a0a stable, consensual government<\/a>. Apparently, such a legitimate constitutional Iraq was not as valuable to Obama as a reelection slogan that he had \u201cended the war\u201d in Iraq.<\/p>\n

Ditto Afghanistan. The once good war that candidate Obama promised to win is pretty bad; for Obama, leaving Afghanistanseems far more important than saving it<\/a>. Again, \u201cBush did it\u201d is all ye need to know about the looming defeat. Let us hope the Taliban does not play the role of\u00a0the North Vietnamese in 1975<\/a>. (How will there be boat people, with no boats and water? Airlifts to mountaintops for mountain people? Beheadings in lieu of reeducation camps?)<\/p>\n

Who, Obama assumes, cares what Libya has become? \u201cWe came, we saw, [Gaddafi] died,\u201d\u00a0Hillary chuckled<\/a>, as if she had been Caesar on a white horse at Zela taking out Pharnaces II of Pontus.<\/p>\n

So what difference at this point does it make? Who, Obama assumes, cares about what happened later in places like Benghazi or the current status of events on the ground in Tripoli? Like the stuff with the Russians and Assad, to the extent these are even problems, they exist down the line for someone else. If Obama retired early during the\u00a0Noche Triste<\/a><\/i>\u00a0in Benghazi and played\u00a015 rounds of cards with Reggie Love<\/a>\u00a0on the night of the Osama bin Laden hit (\u201cI\u2019m not, I\u2019m not going to be down there, I can\u2019t watch this entire thing\u201d), why would he get too worked up about Syria?<\/p>\n

But Iran\u2019s President Rouhani, following Putin\u2019s lead, apparently did. He wrote another therapeutic letter to the American people (albeit\u00a0settling for the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i><\/a>\u00a0rather than\u00a0the\u00a0New York Times<\/i><\/a>; I guess the latter thought this nice dictator stuff could get\u00a0habit-forming<\/a>). The campus diversity czar, peace studies professor, or T-ball coach could have written Rouhani\u2019s script \u2014 and no doubt they were all inspirations for his American speech handlers.<\/p>\n

America, Rouhani reminds us,\u00a0should pay attention to<\/a>\u00a0\u201cidentity\u201d and avoid \u201czero-sum\u201d attitudes. We must look for \u201croot causes\u201d of terrorism, seek \u201cwin-win\u201d results, not get caught in a \u201cCold War\u201d mentality, and we should \u201cdialogue\u201d \u2014 and for the \u201cchildren,\u201d no less. All Rouhani needs to let the centrifuges do their work, for the Republican Guard to finish up in Syria, and for his terrorists to keep blowing stuff up is to drop the lunatic Ahmadinejad mode, go T-ball therapeutic, and find in Obama a decent sort of\u00a0Stanley Baldwin or Neville Chamberlain<\/a>. The glee with which American elites have received Rouhani\u2019s creepy letter suggests, aside from the fact that they read and write that stuff on campus all the time, how well Iranians understand us.<\/p>\n

But more importantly, Rouhani meets an Obama not just weakened over his Syrian embarrassment, but actually convinced that he is \u201cempowered\u201d by it! Although he admits some loss of his usual panache and style, Obama brags that his diplomacy was brilliant, a virtual blueprint of thing to come.<\/p>\n

After all, who could go 360 degrees in two weeks, from imminent bombing to legitimizing Assad and elevating the Russians, all at once ignoring and courting and ignoring the Congress \u2014 only to call it all a head-spinning success, ending with Putin shrugging that it will take lots of time to find WMD, though he (and now Rouhani!) deplores its use that led to one percent of the deaths in Syria? It is as if soaking yourself, and everyone in the vicinity, with gasoline and not lighting the match in your hand is better proof of your prudence than never going for the match and gas can in the first place.<\/p>\n

Again, Rouhani is intrigued by such thinking. The fact that Obama legitimized the Assad, Hezbollah, Iranian axis in Syria, ignored the body count, confused and divided the nation and Congress, outsourced matters of WMD proliferation and use to Vladimir Putin, turned red lines into no-lines and bombing in 24 hours into talking for years \u2014 and called it all a smashing success \u2014 is, well, something worth following up on. Syria is history; Iran is now.<\/p>\n

Most like Rouhani accept that Obama is interested only in a symbolic and rhetorical presidency that follows the path of least resistance. What the name, ethnic profile, and ideology of Obama represent to particular domestic and global constituencies \u2014 rather than\u00a0what he does<\/a>\u00a0or even says \u2014 alone counts. And, of course, Obama has grasped and profited from that reality\u00a0since he left Hawaii<\/a>. It is a sort of codependency that Rouhani wishes to share for a while.<\/p>\n

Yet if Obama\u2019s psychodramas at home and abroad are critical in dividing the nation to win election or reelection, apart from the election cycle, they have little to do with actual governance and so quietly fade away, crisis by crisis. Obama\u2019s existential Syrian civil war already has. In between a new war against evil gun owners and\u00a0a renewed offensive<\/a>\u00a0against nihilist Tea Partiers, we will have now had another melodramatic \u201cbreakthrough\u201d with Iran. As Obama said of his \u201csuccess\u201d with Syria, so too the Iranian diplomacy will not be\u00a0\u201cvery smooth and disciplined and linear,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0but instead will be only \u201cabout getting the policy right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. We are back where we started \u2014 lots of people dying \u2014 as the crisis recedes with a high five and a sigh, rather than with America blowing some stuff up.<\/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":[124,127,146],"tags":[12,249,891,253,1044,1016,424,76],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Ht","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6525,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syria-postmortem\/","url_meta":{"origin":6539,"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":6491,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-box-canyon\/","url_meta":{"origin":6539,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Box Canyon","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Our Hamlet-in-cheif wanted simultaneously to act and not act. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online The Syrian fiasco arose from two mutually contradictory desires. Barack Obama sincerely wanted Bashar Assad to stop killing his own people. Barack Obama also really was not willing to use force to ensure that\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":6376,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syrian-surrealities\/","url_meta":{"origin":6539,"position":2},"title":"Syrian Surrealities","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner Once again we are trying to rally the American people about the dangers of purported WMD use; this time around, the Syrians may be doing to their own what Saddam Hussein most certainly did to the Kurds.\u00a0John Kerry gave an impassioned speech that\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":6437,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-farce\/","url_meta":{"origin":6539,"position":3},"title":"Obama’s Farce","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"He sold his plan for bombing Syria on flawed political assumptions. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online \u00a0 To support the president\u2019s enforcement of his red line in Syria requires suspensions of disbelief. Here are several. I wish it were not true, but there is scant evidence that 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":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/5516984495_a7e9026136-300x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6483,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syria-in-a-nutshell\/","url_meta":{"origin":6539,"position":4},"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":6399,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-the-war-to-save-face-or-save-lives\/","url_meta":{"origin":6539,"position":5},"title":"Is The War to Save Face or Save Lives?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 29, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media Click here to see the symposium of PJ columnists analyzing the pros and cons of an intervention in Syria. Most of the arguments pro and con for an intervention in Syria have already been made. I think the consensus is that while stopping Assad\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\/6539"}],"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=6539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6540,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6539\/revisions\/6540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}