Never has Winston Churchill’s epigram looked so apt as right now: “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing,” the eloquent Briton reportedly said, “after they’ve exhausted all the other possibilities.” Barack Obama at first tried just about every possibility in dealing with Syria but the right one. For many months, he ignored the spreading civil war there, even as it spilled over the borders into Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Obama also failed to respond to the regime’s previous, if smaller, chemical attacks when they were documented in June, despite saying he would act; this failure unquestionably emboldened Bashar al-Assad to escalate his use of chemical weapons until the brazen and deadly attack of last month. And when Obama finally did respond, it was with a neck-wrenching pledge to launch an imminent attack. The turnabout caught everyone off guard, especially vacationing members of Congress whom Obama pledged to bypass—until he abruptly delegated his decision to them.
The president never got his timing right. If Obama wanted Congress to approve military action, he should have waited until members returned from their summer recess, rather than allowing them to get ambushed by an angry and ill-informed public in town meetings while the media chewed up his evidence piecemeal on talk TV over the last two weeks. “That was a miscalculation,” says Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Mike Rogers, the committee chairman, also pointed out, “You can’t really go from a dead stop to full speed. We created our own problem here.”
But now Obama has won a reprieve—thanks to the Russians, of all people, America’s chief antagonists—from what looked like an all-but-certain congressional defeat. In the coming days, the president thus has a chance to avoid what could have been the worst humiliation of his presidency. Indeed, he could even achieve two major victories at once. If Syria, under Russia’s disarmament plan, goes beyond its already startling admission that it possesses chemical weapons (coming only days after Assad’s denials, this is already a victory) and gives its stockpiles up to international inspectors for elimination, it will prove a huge American diplomatic triumph in a region where there haven’t been any U.S. breakthroughs for a very long time.
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