Look There, Caio; See What's Happening, Reader

Dr. Anne Sumers, my ophthalmologist, looks at things from a liberal angle. A Democrat, she even tried for a political office in Washington, but was defeated by a Republican congressman in our district in the state of New Jersey. Good for me — I get to keep my ophthalmologist and our chats together. Syria was an inevitable conversation. Literally eye to eye, she asked me if I was in favor of an attack on Syria. Metaphorically, I lowered my eyes and said yes. I knew it would be censored by my doctor.

My ophthalmologist echoed the reluctance of most liberal sectors over foreign engagement. She thinks that it is time to retreat and to focus on reforming the house here (the liberal Democrats are united in an awkward way with the current isolationism of the Republican Party, concentrated in the tea party).

It is no wonder that my ophthalmologist expressed the view held by the massive majority of public opinion against the congressional authorization of a military operation to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons. This is a country averse to engagement, tired of war. There are ghosts of Iraq, Afghanistan and the dilemmas over who to support in the Arab Spring, especially now with the tragedy of Syria. As an editorial in the current edition of the magazine The Economist points out, there is skepticism over the intelligence conclusions and the proposal for intervention. And, I would add, there is a crisis of credibility in institutions. Look at Barack Obama’s face.

But I counter that inaction will aggravate this crisis of credibility, give more space for genocides such as that of Bashar al-Assad and increase the confidence of champions of nonintervention and of authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China. I am not saying that this will eliminate the strategic uncertainties of engagement; the risk of that will be a bottomless pit, another quagmire. Without drowning in an analytic quagmire, it costs nothing to remember that a little brutal force is necessary to lead the brutal Assad regime to some type of negotiation.

But we are not at that point yet. Barack Obama is lacking the firmness needed, The Economist points out, to adopt hard and unpopular decisions. He went to Congress to seek support because the situation is really terrible, but the president also wants to share the responsibility, although he is commander in chief. At the same time, there is an opacity to Obama, with distinct plans being leaked about the purposes and launch of a military operation.

Everything is blurry and I know that the public views things in the way that Dr. Anne Sumers is looking (with the left or right eye), but I will present the dilemmas of Californian Democratic Representative Alan Lowenthal, a freshman in Congress (elected in 2012). He is in the greatest distress with respect to the authorization (and the liberal vote and how he will decide on this question for Obama). Lowenthal says there are no good answers in Syria. There is a moral dilemma over the use of chemical weapons, which are simply terrible, by a dictator. On the other hand, there will be consequences with involvement.

Like my ophthalmologist (who lost the electoral race), the liberal Alan Lowenthal has a natural resistance to war, but he wants to support the Democrat in the White House. In an interview in the National Journal, Lowenthal says of 653 messages he received from constituents in his district, only 11 were in favor of an attack on Syria.

And like me, Lowenthal is Jewish. He thinks about what is best for the security of Israel (two-thirds of Israelis in polls say they are in favor of an attack). However, Lowenthal is in doubt as to whether a mere launching of missiles in Syria would increase or diminish the threat that its ally, Iran, represents to Israel. And if the operation were larger? Even more unknowns. As a Jew, Lowenthal is especially sensitive to horrible images of innocent people who were victims of gas. We know what happens on the other side. We have already seen horrible images of the barbarism committed by rebels (not only the al-Qaida terrorists). We saw the photo printed in Thursday’s New York Times of the execution of government soldiers.

But the focus today is gas, the victims of Bashar al-Assad. With what moral authority can we look at those images and calculate that inaction is a better stance? Another Democratic freshman, Republican Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and favorable to an authorization, made a call to action during the debate in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He asked his colleagues, in a theatrical move, to look at the images of Assad’s victims, asking how it was possible to be paralyzed in the face of tragedy.

Eye to eye, my ophthalmologist and the vast majority of Americans respond that it is possible.