Bark or Bite

The good news is, American missiles won’t be flying toward Syria today. The bad news is, we just kissed most of the credibility we had in the bank goodbye with President Obama’s decision to seek approval from Congress for a strike on Syria -- after all the run-up that has already taken place. If Congress says no to an attack, President Obama will have little choice but to follow British Prime Minister David Cameron’s lead and stand the military down.

Does that mean we will have given Mr. Assad the green light to continue to use chemical weapons? We have green-lighted innumerable atrocities up to this point, so we might well wonder what’s different now.

Personally, I feel the time for messaging has long since passed. If Mr. Assad personally gave the orders to use chemical weapons, as we have charged, he is already a war criminal of the first order, right up there with Hitler and Pol Pot. If he sees a green light here and resumes the use of such weapons, that should be a green light for us to send a lot more than a message. We will have no reasonable choice – if we want our credibility back -- but to take out Assad – or arrest him and put him on trial. Will that be Iraq II? Can we remove Assad from power, face down Iran and Russia, and let the remaining Syrian factions determine their own fate (which means fighting it out)?

We cannot effect real change, unfortunately, without getting our hands dirty – and if we’re not prepared to do that, we should indeed stay out of Syria and take our credibility lumps. The last war we can take credit for winning (and not solo credit) ended almost 70 years ago. We’ve been tinkering around with war since then, at a great cost to the lives of our young men, and these days, women.

A Syrian woman interviewed on the radio this morning quoted a proverb to the effect that the louder and longer a dog barks, the less it’s apt to bite. We need to stop barking and bite something, or else put the muzzle on and go back to bed.