John Cassidy, writing in The New Yorker, is generally positive about the president’s performance on the Syrian crisis, but he takes a couple of jabs. Are they warranted?
Setting aside the debate about how much criticism the President deserves for sending mixed messages (quite a bit) and how much credit he deserves for bringing the Russians and Syrians to the negotiating table (also quite a bit), the issue is what happens now. If the immediate goal was to stop Assad from gassing his own citizens, it’s been accomplished, at least for the moment…
…On Capitol Hill and in other parts of Washington, the President’s reputation as a decisive leader has taken another knock, but it was never very strong to begin with.
Let’s begin with the idea that the president is guilty of sending “mixed messages.” What were they?
I suppose the first mixed message goes back to when he initially stated that if Assad used chemical weapons it would cross a red line and be a game changer that would have serious consequences. Well, Assad used chemical weapons. Did he face serious consequences?
Back in June when the intelligence community finally decided that Assad had used chemical weapons on a limited basis, Obama reluctantly approved the delivery of lethal aid to the rebels. I’d say that having the world’s strongest military officially coming into a civil war on your opponents’ side is not a welcome development. You might call it a serious development. But if you want to call it something less than serious, we can move on to the administration’s performance in the aftermath of the August 21 sarin attack in Damascus.
While Secretary Kerry certainly engaged in some hyperbole (e.g., Munich) and the administration did a poor job, initially, making a convincing case for culpability, what they actually did was threaten to bomb the Assad regime. I’d call that serious, even if were to be “incredibly limited.” Except bombing Syria would have been a terrible idea, as Mr. Cassidy acknowledges.
Which brings me to Mr. Cassidy’s second dig at the president: that he is not decisive. But what’s the bottom line? Mr. Cassidy says himself, “If the immediate goal was to stop Assad from gassing his own citizens, it’s been accomplished…”
So, how are we going to measure “decisiveness”? If the president had said that Assad using chemical weapons would result in him losing his chemical weapons, and then that is exactly what happened, would we call that a lack of decisiveness? If the immediate goal in the aftermath of the 8/21 attacks was to prevent a recurrence, isn’t that what the president has accomplished?
It seems to me that the president made a decision early on that he did not want to be pulled into the Syrian Civil War, and if he has been decisive about anything, he has certainly been decisive about that. In fact, the lone area when I think he has changed his mind is when he agreed to supply lethal aid to the rebels, because that got our toes in the water a little deeper than the president wanted.
I get that people want to judge the president on style points, but isn’t it results that matter? He managed to keep his word about his red line without firing a shot. Considering that the American people and Congress didn’t support missile strikes or boots on the ground, his accomplishment is almost a miracle.
And people gotta nitpick.
