Being Barack Obama

The storm clouds are gathering over Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

Whether it’s true or not, we like to say that everything is decided in Washington. And, well, that’s exactly what’s happening today. There is no chance that any form of military intervention in the Syrian conflict will get past the U.N. Security Council — China and Russia will stand their ground, exercise their veto or insist on sending more and more missions to Syria, on holding a new Geneva conference and so on.

And so the military operation, which the U.S. press describes as “it’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ the US will attack,” will be carried out by a “small group of NATO allies.” On this occasion, Germany is willing to join the “small group,” but unlike in the case of Libya, the U.S. will no longer be able to pretend they are playing second fiddle — they will have to attack first and take full responsibility for the ensuing chaos in the region, which, as we have seen all too often in recent years, only increases after intervention.

It is clear Barack Obama does not want to get involved in a new military conflict, but, as my friend and colleague Boris Mezhuev has rightly pointed out, “friends are forcing them;” friends are pushing around and manipulating the world hegemon, further backing the administration of the 44th president into the corner, giving him no option but to begin bombing Assad.

But let’s stop for a moment and think: Is the first black president of America really trapped? Has a win-win combination been constructed against him, forcing him to destroy everything he has built up in the field of international relations? Have “friends” simply climbed into the politics of Washington, forcing the president into a “zugzwang”* situation?

Even if “forcing America to war” was caused not just by a confluence of geopolitical circumstances, but the result of deliberate, clever moves, we still cannot excuse Obama. The president of the United States has a tremendously vast amount of resources at his disposal, more than any other country could even dream of. Intelligence, analytics, satellites, drones, the most specialists and experts in the world and, finally, as we have discovered, total network surveillance and phone tapping tools. And all this is useless against some evil machinations? Somehow, I don’t quite believe that.

It is much more reasonable to assume that Obama’s caution and his concept of “leading from behind” are not the marks of a new foreign policy, but an attempt to cover up a complete lack of strategy. Remember how long Obama delayed making a decision on Hosni Mubarak and then suddenly announced support for the protestors, not even bothering to offer political asylum to one of the United States’ main allies in the Middle East or offer escape to another country (as the U.S. has always done in the past).

In Syria, it would seem everything is going the same way. As recently as 2011, Assad was labeled a reformer and trusted negotiator by the Obama administration. Now he has fallen into the ranks of murderers and villains, and some days it seems his country is separated from NATO bombings.

Imagine the head engineer of a factory that has pipes and cables about to overheat and burn out. His subordinates advise him to do many things, including emergency action to replace the entire infrastructure, but the engineer delays, refusing to get overexcited or patch things up here and there, while continuing to demand that the sales director increase the volume of production. How would a situation like this end? Well, it isn’t difficult to imagine! And now imagine that all the advisers who insisted on carrying out some kind of technical plan are removed from work and replaced either by incompetent people or by people who are scared to argue with their boss. In this situation, there is no one to blame for the future accident except for the head engineer.

So, Barack Obama is acting pretty much in this way. Back during the Libyan catastrophe, three women were blamed: Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Hillary left the administration, but the other two liberals were promoted by Obama: One became his adviser on international security, and the other became an ambassador to the United Nations. Others required discipline in the White House, which greatly annoyed the administration, and that is saying something. Tom Donilon was dismissed, and Denis McDonough, one of Obama’s closest confidants, who together with Donilon encouraged the president to support the protestors in Egypt and insurgents in Libya, was sent to do administrative work as chief of staff. As for John Kerry, who was appointed secretary of state due to the influence of Vice President Joe Biden, regardless of his specialty as a congressman (the Middle East), it seems as if he has no opinion at all on the matter of Syria.

If Obama wishes to — especially in his second term, with nothing to lose — he could act consistently and firmly, and refuse to carry out a military operation without the approval of the U.N. Security Council, arguing that the Libyan operation was still somehow approved by the international community. He could threaten the dissolution of the CIA and receive the intelligence he needs from other agencies — the Pentagon, incidentally, is not particularly eager to fight — such as the Department of National Intelligence or even the intelligence of private military contractors who operate in the region. The fact that the (contradictory) data may also turn out to be unreliable is not important; what is important is to declare that they are reliable and that the U.S. will not repeat the mistakes of George W. Bush …

Boris Mezhuev advises Obama to draw on the example of Nixon. But in order to act like Nixon, one needs to be Nixon, who in the field of foreign policy distinguished himself by his decisiveness and strategic vision. Obama is just as unintelligible regarding domestic affairs as he is foreign policy. Well, actually, his health care reforms have consisted of failure after failure, it still feels as though the economy does not really matter to him and he has loudly declared to the world the need to develop “clean” energy. It is as if, after hearing about the eruption of the sewage system, our above-mentioned engineer gave the orders to rearrange the flower beds in front of the plant. So if and when the first American bomb falls on Syria, it would be pointless for Obama to blame his friends.

*Translator’s Note: A German word meaning “obligation to move.”