Obama on war: A realist and risk taker
Demonstrators protest against
military involvement in Syria outside the Houses of Parliament in London
on Thursday, August 29. British Prime Minister David Cameron failed to
secure Parliament's approval for military intervention in Syria. Western
powers have debated the use of military force against Syria's
government in response to a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus.
Barack Obama came to Washington to end wars. Not to start them.
That much was crystal clear only three months ago when Obama gave a keynote speech on May 23
at the National Defense University in Washington in which he called for
an end to the "boundless war on terror" and "perpetual wartime footing"
that has existed in the U.S. since 9/11.
Obama focused part of
this speech on the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that
Congress passed days after 9/11 and that gave President George W. Bush
the authority to go to war in Afghanistan.
No one in Congress who
voted for this resolution at the time realized that he or she was in
effect authorizing in Afghanistan what would become America's longest
war.
Nor did they realize that they were giving a virtual blank check to the president to wage covert U.S. wars in countries such as Pakistan
and Yemen where, according to data compiled by the New America
Foundation, thousands have been killed in CIA drone strikes with almost
no input from Congress.
During his defense
speech, Obama vowed to help end the Authorization for the Use of
Military Force that set in motion the seemingly endless war the U.S. has
been fighting since 2001.
This is some of the
context of Obama's decision to go to Congress to seek authorization for a
military strike on Syria. Obama has wanted to leave office in 2016 as
the president who had made it harder, not easier, for future presidents
to go to war unilaterally without the input of Congress.
In going to Congress for
authorization of any military operation in Syria, we see Obama the
former constitutional law professor at work, but we also see Obama the
pragmatist.
The Obama administration
could have always made the argument in the past few days that it could
justify attacking the regime of Bashar al-Assad on humanitarian grounds
to prevent further massacres of the Syrian people with chemical weapons
despite the fact that there was no international authorization for
attacking Syria and no congressional resolution sanctioning such an
attack.
But that argument would
be a novel one as a matter of international law, and it would not be
particularly compelling as a matter of domestic politics when the
American public seems, at best, split on whether the U.S. should deploy
force in Syria.
Unilateral U.S. military
actions are, of course, nearly uncontroversial after an attack on
American targets by a foreign power or group.
President Bill Clinton
didn't seek congressional approval for the cruise missiles he launched
at al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in 1998 after the terrorist
group's attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Nor did President George
H.W. Bush go to Congress to sign off on his invasion of Panama in 1989,
which he authorized because a U.S, Marine had recently been killed
there and tens of thousands of other Americans living in the country
were purportedly at risk.
Syria hasn't attacked
any U.S. targets or citizens, so the argument that an attack on the
Assad regime is designed to protect American interests or lives is moot.
That leaves the Obama
administration with the option of extracting some kind of authorization
for an attack from international bodies such as the United Nations, NATO
or the Arab League.
As is now well-known,
there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of getting a U.N. authorization
since Russia and China have continuously made clear they would veto such
a resolution.
There also seems little
possibility, for the moment, that NATO will authorize a "humanitarian"
mission as it did in Kosovo in 1999 to roll back Serbian aggression
there. And even if there was such an authorization, right now a major
NATO member, the United Kingdom, couldn't participate because the
British Parliament voted against such a mission on Thursday.
The Arab League, which
signed off on the operation to topple Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, has so
far not signaled a readiness to authorize war against Syria. The League said the world community
should take action against those responsible for the use of chemical
weapons but did not specify if it would endorse military action by the
U.S. or other parties. That said, the usually hypercautious Saudis
publicly urged war on Sunday.
In going to Congress for
the Syria authorization, we see not only the former constitutional law
professor and pragmatist in Obama, but also the calculated risk taker.
On matters of
considerable importance where the potential payoff is large, Obama has
shown he is willing to take risks. Think no further than his decision
two years ago to authorize a Navy SEAL raid to capture or kill Osama bin
Laden in Pakistan, a raid he undertook against the advice of Vice
President Joe Biden and then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. If that
operation had gone poorly, as a number of Obama's top national security
officials believed it could, Obama might now be splitting his time
between Chicago and Hawaii.
For Obama, a
congressional authorization on the use of force in Syria would help him
if he needs to authorize additional military actions down the road in
Syria. It would also help him if he feels compelled to go to war with
Iran. Of course, if he doesn't get such an authorization, he will endure
the same kind of humiliation that British Prime Minster David Cameron
has just gone through in Parliament.
Obama has, however, no doubt tried to game out how this vote might play out.
He probably calculates
that for Republican skeptics in Congress, they will have to explain to
the American public why it is that they will not sanction military
action on Syria after its large-scale use of chemical weapons while they
continue to describe Syria's closest ally, Iran, and its nuclear
weapons program -- which still has yet to produce any nuclear weapons--
as a grave threat to the world.
We can be sure that in
the next days, the administration will make the argument that if you let
Syria take a pass on its large-scale and repeated use of chemical
weapons, you can forget any chance of slowing or ending Iran's nuclear
program, something that is a matter of great importance for much of the
Republican Party.
For those on the left of
the Democratic Party in Congress who are generally skeptical of U.S.
military actions, Obama can essentially ask, "If not now, when?" At what
point will self-described liberals intervene to stop the use of weapons
so vile that they have been banned by the civilized world for almost a
century?
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| A Syrian-American supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad participates in an anti-war rally in New York's Times Square on August 29. |
CNN
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