Obama’s in a Jam on Syria. Military Analysis [View all]

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He has feeble international support, and he doesn’t know what he’s trying to accomplish.



President Obama is in a huge jam on Syria, and it’s not clear how he gets out of it. The problem is twofold. First, he is preparing to take military action against Syria for the sole purpose of enforcing international law. Yet he has very little support from the organizations—or many members of those organizations—that are charged with enforcing international law. If the point of the intervention is to uphold the civilized world’s long-held norms (in this case, norms against the use of chemical weapons), and if he can’t persuade more than a couple other countries to go along, then he doesn’t have a very potent case.

This is not a technical-legal question. It’s central to the strategy and effectiveness of whatever sort of military action he might decide to launch. In his Aug. 28 PBS interview, Obama said that an attack, if he launched one, needed to send “a pretty strong signal that” Bashar al-Assad’s regime “had better not do it again”—i.e., had better not launch any more chemical weapons. And yet if Assad doesn’t see the world closing in on him, if he sees the attack as purely an American (or Western) campaign, against which he can mobilize the usual anti-American (or anti-Western) actors, then the “signal” is going to be pretty weak.

It must have come as a shock when the British Parliament voted down a motion to authorize military action, especially after Prime Minister David Cameron promised Obama that he would join an international coalition to punish Assad for his monstrous acts. Cameron may have thought the motion was a slam dunk. Not since 1782 has a British leader lost a war resolution (the last time was when Parliament decided, against the King’s urgings, to withdraw from the American Colonies). It’s unclear whether this defeat reflects Cameron’s weakness or Britain’s abdication of a role in global politics. But it’s clear in retrospect that Obama should have lined up his ducks before letting his top aides all but announce that the cruise missiles were on their way.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2013/08/obama_s_syria_crisis_he_and_john_kerry_need_a_better_plan_for_dealing_with.html