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I’ve noticed other pundits making it easier on themselves by framing the question in terms of President Obama. Which is fair enough. “Maybe he will get Congress and some allies to go along in the end,” said the Tribune editorial page Sunday. “If so, it will come in spite of his own failures of imagination and leadership.” In the Friday Tribune syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg said Obama was behaving in a way “you don’t have to be a pan-Arab autocrat to think is incredibly stupid.” John Kass wrote Sunday, “Obama’s plan for Syria is almost like Obamacare: We’re not supposed to know what we’re getting until after he gets the votes.” Kass did declare himself, I think. ‘America does not want to pick sides between two groups in Syria that hate us,” he went on. “America doesn’t want any part of this one.” Apparently neither does Kass. The Tribune‘s Steve Chapman was far from alone in wondering, in light of the president’s limited means and limited ends, “whether what Obama has in mind will do any good beyond salving some American consciences.”
Pundits taking the president’s side seemed to do so for reasons that were ultimately philosophical—or temperamental. “As another far-off war worsens, Americans are loath to take sides, even against a merciless dictator, even to the extent of sending weapons,” wrote the New York Times‘s Bill Keller, in an op-ed whose headline—”Our New Isolationism”—made it immediately clear where he was coming from. Steve Coll argued in the New Yorker that an international taboo is at stake, one whose violation will cost us all. “Assad’s forces have already killed tens of thousands of civilians with conventional weaponry. But chemical warfare is a step beyond,” he tried to explain. “Since the Second World War, governments and armies have gradually forsworn weapons that do not distinguish between soldiers and civilians. These include nuclear, biological, and chemical arms, and also land mines and cluster munitions. The treaties that ban such arms are building blocks in a decades-long campaign by human-rights activists to insist that warfare be subordinated to international law.”
