In the Republican and Democratic presidential debates, President Barack Obama’s
ultimate rejection of using force against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, for
using chemical weapons against his own people, keeps being raised as an issue.
In all cases, the debate moderators have been pushing the candidates to call
out the president for being “weak.” In the Democratic debate, the
candidates avoided this characterization, but of course the Republicans bring
up the episode second only to the equally overstated and unimportant episode
of the Obama administration’s response to the attack on diplomatic facilities
in Benghazi, Libya — principally because current candidate Hillary had
a bigger role in Benghazi simply because she had left her post as Secretary
of State eight months before Obama made the decision not to use force against
Assad.
But what of Obama’s of “weakness” and “appeasement” of
Assad? Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany in the late 1800s and
a master of international Machiavellian diplomacy, would have been appalled
at these characterizations. So likely would have Napoleon Bonaparte, one of
the greatest military commanders of all time. Obama’s threat eventually led
to Russia’s pressure on Assad, its ally, to get rid of his chemical weapons
entirely. Happy ending, right? Not according to the Republican candidates. In
2016, the Republican candidates, and occasionally Hillary — to show how
tough they are — would have the United States behave like a dimwitted body
builder at the beach who goes around punching people for no reason. Apparently,
according to Republican thinking on the Assad matter, the world thought Obama
was a wimp for not following through on his threat to use force, no matter how
good the outcome attained without it. Obviously, the Russians took Obama’s threat
to use force seriously, because they pushed their ally Assad to get rid of his
chemical weapons. So the choice was between punitive, purely symbolic, and likely
ineffectual U.S. military “retaliation” and an even better outcome
— an Assad stripped of his chemical weapons.
Bismarck probably would have thought the latter outcome to be very satisfactory.
In fact, back in the old days when Bismarck was tromping around, “appeasing”
enemies by paying them off instead of fighting them — as General David
Petraeus adroitly did in Iraq, disguised as a macho American troop “surge”
— was considered smart. Similarly, to get better press, maybe Obama should
have made a deal with Russia to bomb a few empty buildings in the Syrian desert
to make the whole thing look macho.