Barack Obama arrives to speak at a news conference at the G20 Summit. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Obama might be able to persuade Congress to approve his Syrian adventure. The Senate seems more inclined to advise and consent, since he does have a Democratic majority there. And only a third of its members must go before their constituents next November for a new lease on their office. Still, there are quite a number of Democrats in the Senate who remain unpersuaded that unleashing Tomahawk missiles on Damascus is an optimal way of resolving their crisis and persuading President Assad to stand down from his use of chemical weapons.
Across the Capitol in the House, the vote is even more precarious. First, the Democrats don’t even have a majority there. But more to the point, House members are even closer to their constituents — and, with all of their jobs on the line next November, they have more to lose and face voters with a shorter memory-span.
Still, Obama could manage to jawbone a narrow victory through both chambers. On Tuesday, he’s going directly to the American people — more than half of whom remain skeptical that their nation needs to involve itself in yet another conflict in the Middle East that poses little or no proximate threat to their security or way of life. Barely a third are prepared even to entertain such a move. Yet the President is hoping that when Congress returns to Washington on Monday, its members removed from the direct influence of their constituents, they might listen to reason and approve some form of military action
But at what cost? A considerable one, by all calculations. The very viability of Obama’s presidency may very well be at stake. Consider the rest of the legislative landscape — or just the foreground of that landscape. First, unless Congress raises the debt ceiling, the Treasury Department estimates we’ll run out of money by mid-October. That’s just around the corner, on the other side of another vicious and bitter debate in Congress. Debt ceiling is red meat to most Republicans, let alone the Tea Party. Then, there’s the whole issue of the federal budget and how to put an end to the sequester, which has put a permanent damper on any number of federal initiatives, cost hundreds of thousands of government workers large chunks of their paychecks, and for many their very livelihoods. That’s not to mention a host of other critical priorities — including implementation of Obamacare, which the Republicans in Congress want desperately to repeal.
For all of these issues, the President will need every ounce of good will he can muster. And frankly, he’s on the cusp of using up whatever good will has remained in this debate over Tomahawk missiles. If he has any doubt about what’s in store for him when the Syrian debate opens up this week, he has only to tune into the seven hours of vitriol heaped on British Prime Minister Dennis Cameron in the House of Commons during his losing bid to join the Americans in a strike on Syria.
Which brings us to the final challenge facing Obama—the rest of the world. As the President discovered this week in St. Petersburg, there’s not much sympathy for his views in most of the countries whose leaders gathered for the summit of the world’s wealthiest and most privileged nations—the G-20. Clearly the Russians and the Chinese aren’t on his side. They continue to stonewall in the U.N. Security Council. Putin even announced that even if the Americans launched on attack on their own, he’d continue supplying weaponry to the Syrian dictator. The Brits ware sitting this one out. Even French President François Hollande, perhaps the last leader of a major nation prepared to join U.S. forces in a Syrian adventure, has been forced to present his project for debate in his National Assembly. Across Europe, public opinion is running more than 50 percent opposed to a strike, with barely 25 percent in most countries in favor. Moreover, even the Arab League, most of whose members privately, even publicly, abhor the atrocities being committed by Assad’s forces in Syria, can’t actually bring themselves — despite U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s vague words about funding for intervention coming from League member states — to invite the hated and feared American military into their neighbor’s neighborhoods. Yet again, our leaders stand alone
So, once again, in the face of all this opposition, can the U.S. decide simply to press ahead? Especially if this time it really will be alone? Recall that the reason the Brits opted out was their memory of how badly they were burned the last time they followed American intelligence blindly into a punitive operation in the Middle East to assure the destruction of Iraq’s (as it turned out, non-existent) weapons of mass destruction.
And even if Obama manages to egnerate foreign support, he will have weak domestic support, as noted: the vast mass of the American people seem to be saying that, as ghastly and appalling as the civil war is proving in Syria, it’s simply not their war. Perhaps it’s time for Obama to look back and examine his nation’s own history. The turning point in its Revolution, indeed the only reason the French entered on the Colonial side (remember General Lafayette?) was really because it was their enemy, Britain, that was being flayed by the revolutionaries. It was a whole lot easier and less potentially deadly to take them on an ocean away in some remote colonies than just across the English Channel. And when it came to the U.S. Civil War, the rest of the world largely let the Americans sort it out by themselves.
David A. Andelman is the Editor of World Policy Journal. Previously he served as Executive Editor of Forbes. Earlier, he was a domestic and foreign correspondent for The New York Times in various posts in New York and Washington, as Southeast Asia bureau chief, based in Bangkok, then East European bureau chief, based in Belgrade. He then moved to CBS News where he served for seven years as Paris correspondent, traveling through and reporting from more than 70 countries. He is the author of three books, most recently, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today. Twitter: @DavidAndelman
