Washington Post foreign-affairs writer Max Fisher attempts to decipher the Obama administration's cryptic balance:
[W]hat the Obama administration appears to want is a limited, finite series of strikes that will be carefully calibrated to send a message and cause the just-right amount of pain. It wants to set Assad back but it doesnβt want to cause death and mayhem. So the most likely option is probably to destroy a bunch of government or military infrastructure--much of which will probably be empty.
It is militarily axiomatic, however, that effective intervention/retaliation means death and mayhem. Boutique bombing may have its advocates, but they are few in numbers and historically sparse in results. I have no idea how "just the right amount of pain" translates into any real pain if the slap fails to sting.
Hence the martial concept of overwhelming force. If you're going to impose yourself in someone else's war, go big, and go for finality--a conceptual commitment steeped in the laudable corollary of prior restraint. Is your intervention worth it? Are you willing to go all the way? Have you the resources, the domestic support, the determination, a dependable in-country ally, a compelling national-interest casus belli, as well as the strategic capability to finish it? If you answer no to any of these questions, then, as the cavalry would say, hold your horses.
Unlike the United States, the Assad regime is fighting for self-preservation--and there's no human drive more primal or potentially savage than that. What will bombing some of Assad's empty government buildings and cratering an airstrip or two accomplish? From our strategic vantage point, nothing. Yet to Assad--and his allies--a slap is still a slap. And interventionist slaps don't generally go unanswered.