Strike Would Be Tremendous Risk for Obama

Are the Americans going to war again? Or will they agree to Assad’s offer at the last minute? Syria’s head of state could take revenge on Israel and Turkey.

Today, President Barack Obama is making a speech to the nation about Syria. Until last night, some observers had thought the first American cruise missiles might be raining down on Syrian targets at the same time. Most assumed, however, that before giving the order to strike he would wait for the vote of Congress from whom he had asked approval, even though this is not obligated in the Constitution.

But now there is a turnaround in sight. In a nighttime TV interview, Obama said that the strike would be paused if the Syrian government were prepared to put their chemical weapons under international control, which Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem promised to do during a visit to Moscow. Obama saw this as “a potentially significant breakthrough.”

Finding a loophole, Obama thereby met the concerns of the U.S. Congress and the skepticism of his own population and many Europeans halfway.

For days in Washington they have been discussing plans for a two or three day attack as “punishment” for Bashar Assad’s ascribed gas attack. It would be a “limited, proportional” attack, according to Obama; ground forces would not be deployed alongside it.

Punishment? Put bluntly, the Americans want to go to war in the Middle East for the fourth time in 22 years.

Obama’s avowed aim is to send a signal to rogue nations, authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations that they can not “develop and use weapons of mass destruction and not pay a consequence.”

One might doubt, and with good reason, that a limited strike will achieve the desired outcome. The American commentators are of divided opinion, as are the political parties — Republicans as well as Democrats. Some groups rejected the intended strike because it did not go far enough; neoconservative advocates of America’s role in the world order and paleoconservative isolationists are in agreement over this for different reasons.

A predominant majority of Americans are tired of conflict and frustrated after 12 years of endless war in Afghanistan, after Libya and after the dubious drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. They think like Sarah Palin from the tea party, as she questioned on her Facebook page: “So we’re bombing Syria because Syria is bombing Syria?” And in an earlier speech when she opined: “Let Allah sort it out.”

In reality, it is not about an acute threat to U.S. security. Foreign Minister John Kerry let the cat out of the bag. His reasoning — if we don’t strike Syria “we will have lost credibility in the world.”

To which Anna Simons, professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, correctly observes that “U.S. credibility is not at stake in Syria. The president’s credibility is at stake.” A year ago he frivolously drew a red line at the point where [according to him] “ … we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized” and must now try to save face. It could help if Assad were to give in.

Because if Obama gives the order to strike, he will be taking a huge gamble.

The military strike would not end the civil war, but rather fuel it. The Assad regime could retaliate on Israel, Turkey and Lebanon. The effect on Iraq, already without peace, would be predictably catastrophic.

The whole state architecture of the Middle East — the way it was built after the first World War by the English and the French in sovereign disregard of the tribal and religious situation on the desert sand — could collapse if a strike were to take place.

The moral justification of punishment would resolve nothing if Obama’s tomahawks send thousands of innocent civilians to their deaths as “collateral.” Just one death more than the 1,492* gas deaths in Ghouta would suffice to stamp America’s moral standards as a cynical farce.

Ultimately, however, an attack would shoot down the last chance of a political solution. Diplomacy, which by an embarrassing failure of world powers has until now scarcely played any role, would be completely pushed aside.

Josef Joffe last week cited a quote worth thinking about from Winston Churchill on this matter: “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy.” This sentence mirrors the deep awareness defined by Clausewitz in his term the “friction” of war: “War is the province of chance.” At a different time [he said], “In war more than anywhere else things do not turn out as we expect.”

Obama’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, knows his Clausewitz. A few weeks ago he wrote, “Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.”

Will Barack Obama shy away from the attack at the last minute? There is still a chance.

*Editor’s note: Death tolls range for 281 to 1,729 people. It is not clear how the author arrived at this figure.