Obama’s Farce

To support the president’s enforcement of his red line in Syria requires suspensions of disbelief. Here are several.

I wish it were not true, but there is scant evidence that the world, led by the U.S., went to war in the past over the use of weapons of mass destruction — whether by Gamel Nasser in Yemen or by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds and the Iranians. Understandably, the current West’s reaction, including Obama’s, to possible Syrian WMD use is calibrated mostly on the dangers of intervention, not the use of WMD per se. Thus Obama is now focusing on Syria in a way he is not, at least overtly, on Iran, the far greater WMD threat, because he believes the former could be handled with two days’ worth of Tomahawks and the latter could not. That would be understandable pragmatism if it were not dressed up in the current humanitarian bluster about red lines and the “international community.”

Obama, I think, is inadvertently doing the terrible arithmetic that the last 1,000 Syrians killed by the Assad regime pose a humanitarian crisis that demands his intervention in a way that the first 99,000 did not — on the theory that WMD represent an existential threat. (In fact, from the trenches of World War I to Hiroshima, WMD have never killed more than contemporary horrific conventional weaponry has.) So far Obama has not made that case. We can only wonder whether the forgotten hundreds of thousands butchered from Rwanda to Darfur — without so much as one Tomahawk or Hellfire launched on their behalf — might have been saved had only their killers begun their devilry with sarin gas.

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