Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Charlie Cook is one of the most respected and least political analysts in Washington. This is a very sobering article. I know it may seem as if we are picking on President Obama's handling of the Syrian issue, but frankly it should be picked on because he has handled it so poorly and the unintended consequences could be so damaging. Over 100,000 Syrians have been killed by Assad with conventional weapons and there was no sabre rattling from the Administration.

To his credit Bill Clinton stepped into Kosovo to stop the ethnic cleansing with a clear objective of what he wanted to accomplish. I don't see that with Obama, and that's how mission creep sets in.

Does Obama Have the Right to Change His Mind on Syria?

September 2, 2013 | 12:30 p.m.

Damage from battles between the rebels and the Syrian government forces, in Aleppo, Syria, June 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Aleppo Media Center AMC)

"Whatever your views on the larger issues, it's hard not to conclude that the administration's handling of Syria over the last year has been a case study in how not to do foreign policy." That one line in a column written over the weekend by CNN's Fareed Zakaria, one of the most thoughtful journalistic voices on foreign policy matters, is pretty devastating and probably dead on. The last few days specifically, have not been a pretty sight.
Just in case anyone was on an island in the South Pacific over the past couple of weeks, all of this is over whether the United States should attack Syria to punish President Bashar al-Assad and his regime for reportedly using chemical weapons, specifically sarin gas, on his country's citizens, killing more than 1,400 of them, including hundreds of children. Just over a year ago, in August 2012, President Obama told reporters at the White House, "We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region, that that's a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front, or the use of chemical weapons. That would change my calculations significantly." That was a bold and unambiguous statement; it projected strength and leadership. This is the kind of statement that should not be made without having both the will and ability to back it up if necessary. As Zakaria put it, "Now, a pundit can engage in grandiose speech. The president of the United States should make declarations like this only if he has some strategy to actually achieve them. He did not."

It is very clear that Obama and his administration had every intention of launching an attack late last week, reportedly with ship-launched cruise missiles, possibly followed by manned, stealth bombers. The purpose was to punish the Syrian regime, but not to topple it, as there is reason to believe that some rebel elements are as bad for the United States, if not worse, than Assad is. So there was a certain amount of needle-threading involved here. Hurt Assad enough to make him hurt, regret what he did, ensure that he never does that again, and make a strong point for despots elsewhere and in the future—but not significantly alter the balance in the civil war, at least until there is a viable side that we would actually want to see win and govern Syria. But is there really an eye in that needle? Just enough but not too much?

A U.S. attack seemed inevitable until three things happened. First came NBC News polling showing considerable skepticism and opposition to an attack. Next, the British Parliament's vote turning down Prime Minister David Cameron's move for the United Kingdom to participate in a U.S.-led attack to punish Syria. Then a chorus of members of Congress, from both sides of the aisle, started either opposing or, more frequently, calling for congressional approval before any attack. Clearly, Obama was going to come under intense fire no matter what he did. The fact that the U.S. has been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq for just over 12 years, the longest period of sustained war in American history, no doubt is a major factor in the weariness on the part of average citizens and elected leaders and their reluctance to get involved in almost any level with another war. Even if something looked limited in scope, the fear of deeper involvement is huge. As University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato sarcastically tweeted, "Syria is in the Middle East. What could go wrong?"

Friday night, Obama got cold feet and pulled back, deciding to seek congressional approval after all. To many, Obama's lurching suggests that he was weak, inconsistent, and indecisive, a pretty bad combination for the person heading up the world's largest superpower. But perhaps Obama was following the admonition of Shakespeare's Falstaff in Henry IV that discretion is the better part of valor. Putting aside the substantive policy question whether we should or should not punish Syria for its apparent use of chemical weapons with a surgical and proportionate attack—and there are plenty of meritorious arguments on both sides of that question—what if he just changed his mind? Are presidents allowed to second-guess themselves and change their minds if they conclude that a previous or tentative decision was made in error? Some might suggest that the country would have been better served had President Johnson acted on what we are now learning of his own increasing reservations about the wisdom of the Vietnam War. Should glands trump brains and judgment?

Even if he never should have made the red-line stand last year, does that obligate Obama to act on it if there is growing evidence that at least half of the public as well as some of our closest allies do not support it? If there is one agreed-upon lesson from Vietnam, it is, don't get into a fight that the American people do not support. And was the chance of successfully threading that needle worth the risk of the situation escalating out of control, perhaps with an attack on Israel? Should a president make a statement, no matter how ill-advised it might be, then say, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" regardless of the circumstances and just to be consistent?

It's not as if Obama has been a pacifist on all other issues. His decision to order a surge of troops in Afghanistan, whether a good decision or not, wasn't the action of a committed dove. It certainly antagonized MoveOn.org and the left in his party (though they remained largely quiet about it). The decision to send Seal Team Six into Pakistan in the middle of the night to kill Osama bin Laden was a pretty gutsy call, one that if bungled could well have been the death knell for his reelection, just as the ill-fated attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran contributed to President Jimmy Carter's reelection loss.

While the Constitution clearly gives Congress the responsibility to declare war, there is plenty of precedent for presidents to order limited kinetic military operations abroad. But as one foreign policy pro who has served in government in both the executive and legislative branches put it, "He has reduced the presidency by declaring a course of action then backing away and hiding behind the worst legislature in modern times. We know he hates them and has no respect for them, and now he's saying he can't act on what he's said is a compelling international risk unless he waits two weeks for people who can't pass National Peach Week."

Finally, the question is how this whole episode, however it turns out, will be read in Tehran. How will the president's actions and, for that matter, what Congress does, be interpreted by Iran as it pushes the nuclear-weapons development envelope there? This is not nearly as clear-cut as the cable pundits on both sides of the issue make it out to be.

Obama Unplugged

This really says it all about how inconsistent, dare I say dishonest President Obama has been in his dealing with Congress and doing his job.

Obama seeks an accomplice for Syria action

By George F. Will, Published: September 3 E-mail the writer

Because Syria’s convulsion has become as serious as Barack Obama has been careless in speaking about it, he is suddenly and uncharacteristically insisting that Congress participate in governance. Regarding institutional derangements, he is the infection against which he pretends to be an immunization.
In the Illinois legislature, he voted “present” 129 times to avoid difficulties; now he stoops from his executive grandeur to tutor Congress on accountability. In Washington, where he condescends as a swan slumming among starlings, he insists that, given the urgency of everything he desires, he “can’t wait” for Congress to vote on his programs or to confirm persons he nominates to implement them. The virtues of his policies and personnel are supposedly patent and sufficient to justify imposing both by executive decrees.

In foreign policy, too, he luxuriates in acting, as most modern presidents have improvidently done, without the tiresome persuasion required to earn congressional ratifications. Without even a precipitating event such as Syria’s poison gas attack, and without any plausible argument that an emergency precluded deliberation, he waged protracted war against Libya with bombers and cruise missiles but without Congress.
Now, concerning Syria, he lectures Congress, seeking an accomplice while talking about accountability. Perhaps he deserves Congress’s complicity — if he can convince it that he can achieve a success he can define. If success is a “shot across the bow” of Syria’s regime, he cannot fail: By avoiding the bow, such a shot merely warns of subsequent actions.
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has advertised his skepticism about intervening in Syria. His very public intrusion in a policy debate may exceed what is proper for the uniformed military, but he seems to have played Obama as dexterously as Duke Ellington played a piano. Dempsey assured Obama that the military mission could be accomplished a month from now. (Because the bow will still be there to be shot across?) This enabled Obama to say that using the military to affirm an international norm (about poison gas), although urgent enough to involve Congress, is not so urgent that Congress’s recess required abbreviation.
Britain’s Parliament inadvertently revived the constitutional standing of Congress when British Prime Minister David Cameron’s incompetent management of the parliament’s vote resulted in the body refusing to authorize an attack. His fumble was a function of Obama’s pressuring him for haste. If Parliament had authorized an attack — seven switched votes would have sufficed — Obama probably would already have attacked, without any thought about Congress’s prerogatives. The Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman reports that, in an Aug. 24 telephone conversation with Cameron, Obama “made it clear that he wanted a swift military response — before global outrage dissipated and Bashar al-Assad’s regime had the chance to prepare its defenses.”
Many Republicans are reluctant to begin yet another military intervention in a distant and savage civil war. Other Republicans, whose appetite for such interventions has not been satiated by recent feasts of failure, will brand reluctance as “isolationism.” Reluctant Republicans can invoke Dwight Eisenhower.
He, who in 1961 enriched America’s lexicon with the phrase “military-industrial complex,” sought the presidency in 1952 to prevent its capture by what he considered an isolationist, or at least insufficiently internationalist, Republican faction represented by “Mr. Republican,” Ohio Sen. Robert Taft. Yet after one look as president-elect at the front line in Korea, Eisenhower ended that war. To advisers urging intervention on France’s behalf in Vietnam, he said (this from his memoirs): “Employment of airstrikes alone to support French troops in the jungle would create a double jeopardy: it would comprise an act of war and would also entail the risk of having intervened and lost.” He was not an interventionist regarding the 1956 Hungarian revolution, and he not only refused to support the 1956 British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, he ruthlessly forced its termination. About his brief and tranquil intervention in Lebanon, he wrote: “I had been careful to use [about U.S. forces] the term ‘stationed in’ Lebanon.”
Obama’s sanctimony about his moral superiority to a Congress he considers insignificant has matched his hypocrisy regarding his diametrically opposed senatorial and presidential understandings of the proper modalities regarding uses of military force. Now he asks from the Congress he disdains an authorization he considers superfluous. By asking, however reluctantly, he begins the urgent task of lancing the boil of executive presumption. Surely he understands the perils of being denied an authorization he has sought, and then treating the denial as irrelevant.

War By Guilt Trip

Interesting that in the resolution the administration drafted the words did not match the words that the President was using about the limited nature of the mission. It gave him broad authority to do almost anything.That's why Congress is re-drafting it to make sure that it is in fact limited. We still don't have a clear statement of what the objectives are or how success will be measured. I sure hope Kerry doesn't pull a 2004 and say he was "for it before he was against it." To move into military action by laying a guilt trip on members of Congress who don't agree is not the proper motivation.

Kerry holds objectors responsible for any future atrocities in Syria

Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Tuesday that members of Congress who refused to authorize retaliatory strikes against Syria would be responsible when the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad gasses its citizens or when North Korea or Iran attempts to use nuclear weapons.
Opening the administration’s official pitch to Congress for action, Mr. Kerry testified at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that he didn’t want to rule out the need for the U.S. to deploy troops to the ground in Syria — then backtracked and said if it means winning a vote, they have “no problem” with Congress writing a resolution prohibiting troops.

PHOTOS: Say hello, Assad: See the Navy warships off the coast of Syria

Late Tuesday, the top members of the committee said they had agreed on the text of a resolution that would prohibit “combat” troops from being deployed to Syria and would give the president just 90 days to conduct his strikes.
That resolution will be put to a committee vote Wednesday. The administration hopes it begins to build momentum for eventual approval by both chambers of Congress.
The White House picked up an important ally in House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, who emerged from a meeting with President Obama to say he will vote to authorize an attack on Syria.

Enlarge Photo

Whether Mr. Boehner brings any support with him, though, is questionable. Every day, more rank-and-file House members are adding their names to the list of those opposed to the authority Mr. Obama is seeking, and some lawmakers said they see little sign that the administration is winning over undecideds.
Instead, it will be up to lawmakers to try to craft a limited resolution that they can support — one that likely will dictate far more limits than the president requested.
The version released by senators late Tuesday restricts the scope of action in Syria and presses the administration to look into arming moderate rebels fighting to overthrow Mr. Assad.

“Our negotiations have led to a much narrower authorization that provides for the appropriate use of force while limiting the scope and duration of military action, prohibiting boots on the ground, and requiring the Obama administration to submit their broader plan for Syria,” said Sen. Bob Corker, the key Republican in the negotiations, hours after Mr. Kerry and the top two Defense Department officials — Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — testified to the Foreign Relations Committee.
In his testimony, Mr. Kerry said there no longer can be any doubt that troops loyal to Mr. Assad used chemical weapons against civilians in rebel-held territory on Aug. 21 and that the only question now is whether the U.S. will enforce Mr. Obama’s and the world’s “red line.”
In the most pointed remarks of the day, Mr. Kerry compared those who would vote against action to the case of the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Germany that was turned away from Cuba, the U.S. and Canada in 1939 — and had to return to Europe, where many of its passengers eventually died in Nazi camps.
“Are you going to be comfortable if Assad, as a result of the United States not doing anything, then gasses his people yet again?” Mr. Kerry told his former colleagues on the Foreign Relations Committee. “It’s a guarantee, if the United States doesn’t act together with other countries, we know what Assad will do. That’s a guarantee. I can’t tell you what’s guaranteed that some country will do if we do act, but I know what will happen if we don’t.”
Those claims were met with skepticism among some lawmakers, who said it was just as likely that Mr. Assad backs away from further use of chemical weapons and who said they feared that limited U.S. strikes, rather than settling the situation, would lead to a regional escalation.
“I am reluctant,” said Sen. James E. Risch, Idaho Republican. “If there was one American, if this was an attack against any American, against any American interest, this would be a no-brainer for me. But I’m reluctant at this point. And part of it stems from where this is going to go, as to the limit that we’re going to put on it.”
Still, a majority of the 18-member committee appeared to be leaning in favor of action, heeding the call of Senate leaders who appeared to be pushing for lawmakers to pass a resolution that would give a stamp of approval for Mr. Obama to act.

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