Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
— “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, one of the best pieces of news in 2013 was of the “dog that did nothing in the night-time” variety. We managed — if only by the skin of our teeth — to avoid going to war over the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons. I use the word “war” advisedly. An attack, however limited, would have been an unambiguous act of belligerence. Efforts to describe it as something else are exercises in euphemism. There is a perfectly good, old-fashioned English word to describe when one country attacks another with deadly and destructive military force. That word is “war.”
From all evidence, President Obama was prepared to go to war late last August. He had, a year earlier, backed himself into a corner by declaring the use of chemical weapons in Syria a “red line.” With compelling evidence that Syrian government forces had used such weapons on Aug. 21, 2013, the president apparently decided he had no choice but to launch an attack. Two events upset his plans. The first was the vote against war in the British House of Commons, which stripped the attack of much of its international legitimacy. (A cardinal rule of U.S. foreign policy: If the United Kingdom isn’t willing to go along with us, we’re in trouble.) The second was abundant evidence of public opposition to the strike, which prompted the president, however begrudgingly, to seek congressional approval. (The administration had launched our attack on Libya without such approval.) Then, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered the administration an exit from its predicament: a possible deal with Syria to destroy its chemical weapons. In the event, the deal was struck and — despite the doubts of many observers, including me — appears to be sticking, though with delays.
Putin is no friend of the United States. He assuredly played the part of deus ex machina for the Obama administration for reasons of his own: to buy time for his embattled clients in Damascus; to burnish his own reputation on the international stage; to enhance Russia’s meager influence in the Middle East. Whatever his reasons, Putin did President Obama and the United States a great favor. The civil war in Syria is a tragedy for the country’s inhabitants; it threatens the stability of Syria’s neighbors; and it has become a proxy battle in a broader struggle between Shiite Iran and the Sunni autocracies of the Persian Gulf. But it is precisely the sort of conflict — savage, factional and rooted in long-standing historical grievances — into which the United States plunges at our peril. Our costly adventure in Iraq — thousands of American lives lost, hundreds of billions in wasted tax dollars, not to mention the terrible toll on Iraqis — is a salutary lesson in the danger of hubris. We may be the most powerful country in the world, but our strengths are ill-suited to addressing ambiguous civil conflicts where today’s friend might well turn into tomorrow’s enemy.
President Obama has predictably been pilloried for his lack of “leadership” on Syria. He has surely made mistakes. I’ve already mentioned the gratuitous declaration of a “red line” that limited his options. Another unforced error was the president’s call for the departure of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2011, when the administration had no plan that guaranteed Assad’s removal from power. But much of the criticism of the president’s “leadership” from interventionists is really nothing of the sort: It is fundamentally a call for a change of policy, in this case one that more directly and — to my mind, at least — more dangerously entangles the United States in the Syrian morass.
President Obama clearly bungled his drive for an attack on Syria in the hectic days before Putin extended him a diplomatic lifeline. The president failed to assemble an international coalition in support of the strike; he misjudged the political state of play in Washington and around the country; administration officials sent out confusing, even contradictory, signals on the purpose and scope of the planned attack. Was this poor leadership? Perhaps. But, for the extent to which it kept us out of an unnecessary and unwise war, we should be grateful for it.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.