President Obama’s East Room speech tonight was unusual, and probably unique, because it raised throughout the question: Why are you giving this speech? It was originally conceived as an argument for military action in Syria, but then two things happened in quick succession to make that moot. First, public opinion turned from skeptical to wildly hostile, especially among Republicans, killing any chance of passage in the House. Next, John Kerry, or perhaps Albert Brooks, set off an accidental chain of events that relocated the crisis into the diplomatic realm.
But the case for war is still necessary, since, after all, the diplomacy is only going on as a way of averting military action. The moment Bashar al-Assad loses his fear of a cruise missile strike is the moment diplomacy ceases. And Assad’s eagerness, at least rhetorically, to sign the Chemical Weapons Ban rebuts the commonly made argument that he didn’t fear air strikes and might even welcome them as a unifying event.
Obama briefly made the case that the United States had a national security interest in upholding the international ban on chemical weapons, but the caseremains absurd. No enemy states are in position to gain an advantage by using chemical weapons against the United States, nor does the ban on such weapons discourage them from illicitly funneling such weapons to terrorists if they so desire.
The real argument, the one he emphasized at more length, remains persuasive, if marginally so: If we don’t impose a cost on the use of chemical weapons against civilians, then Assad and other dictators will proceed to use them more frequently. Stopping Assad from gassing civilians is a small step in the context of a murderous civil war, but it is something. It was only after laying out the case for war for more than ten minutes that Obama even mentioned the possibilities of diplomacy, and promised to give it a chance, using the threat of strikes as a leverage point.
