America and Syria: To Bomb, or Not to Bomb?
OPPOSITION to the “dumb war” in Iraq helped win Barack Obama the White House and secured him a Nobel peace prize without trying. The president is now learning the loneliness of the war leader, as he prepares a reluctant America for military strikes on Syria, with—or, he hinted—without formal backing from Congress.
Mr Obama triggered rancorous debate in Washington after making a surprise announcement on August 31st that he wanted congressional approval for strikes against Bashar Assad’s regime, in response to nerve-agent attacks that left more than 1,000 dead. Though congressional support is far from guaranteed, and opinion polls show that Americans oppose air strikes on Syria (see chart), Mr Obama declared that action to prevent future uses of chemical weapons was necessary.
“I do think that we have to act,” the president said during a brief visit to Sweden on his way to a G20 summit in St Petersburg. If resolutions and condemnations were the only response to Mr Assad’s use of chemical weapons, he suggested, it would signal that international norms could be flouted “with impunity”.
It was a week of ironies. Mr Obama has been a reluctant warrior over Syria, insisting that American intervention risked doing more harm than good. He went to Congress to make his opponents take shared responsibility for any decision to strike in the Middle East, or to leave the Assad regime unpunished.