Way out, on a limb, in a corner, in the dark

After Prime Minister Cameron's "bungled" and "embarrassing" misfortune in Parliament--and those descriptions come from his friends in the White House--President Obama "is left to cope with miscalculations on both sides of the Atlantic," writes David Sanger unsympathetically about the president's Syrian pickle. "If he goes ahead with the strike -- which seems all but inevitable ... -- he will look more isolated than any president in recent memory entering a conflict."

Indeed this entire affair is beginning to read like a Gothic horror story inside a Greek tragedy. The gods are fickle, and they'll screw you every time. And in this case, Obama's case, they've done so less over his infamous "red line" usage (or so my entrail-reading tells me) than his inclusion beside it of a certain possessive pronoun: If "we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons ... that would change my calculus. That would change my equation."

The "we" could have translated into the "world community," which is in fact how State Secretary John Kerry repeatedly translated it yesterday, even if his upshot, in further fact, meant only the United States. Still, the obfuscation was there, it was available, it was a plausible out from lone interventionism. Whoa, by "we" I meant every nation of decency and good conscience, Obama could have explained later; but he had saddled himself, by my calculus, with his equation. He was on the hook--and now abstract credibility is driving a potentially catastrophic event.

I readily confess not only the thinness, but the present uselessness, of this reed. Peace by pronoun-clarification would have been quite unlikely, and in any case Obama did add multiple my's, and there's no way around it. He's stuck, we're stuck, and a yet-unknown number of killed-by-credibility Syrians are stuck with the mad, inexorable fallout of a possessive pronoun. 

Comments

[Peter G]

The alternative, of course, is to declare chemical weapons use in Syria, or anywhere else for that matter, to be encapsulated in a Somebody Else's Problem Field. Iraq is just the gift that keeps on giving.

[Janicket]

Well, I wish we had one of those fields operational right about now!

[JTL]

What I can't understand is why he hasn't asked for a vote on this. Surely the temporary embarrassment of losing the vote (if he did) would be outweighed by the cover for not doing anything. And if the vote supported his action, he has some cover.

Regardless of the morals, one way or another, this is looking more and more like a HUGE political folly, on top of a geopolitical mistake. What makes it worse is that we elected Obama to avoid this precise situation.

Dammit.

[JTL]

My timing was off by minutes. It now appears that he will seek Congressional approval. Score for one some SOME measure of prudence.

Now let's hope they follow the British example and follow public opinion.