Last night's "PBS Newshour" was absolutely fascinating. It pitted a U.S. president burdened with immense political problems unmasked by verbal contortions against an international relations professor trying his best to unburden the president with blunt, straightforward assessments of global realism. Yet the unburdening process was too late; the president had already backed himself inescapably into a self-contrived trap.
Note the president's verbal tic:
[Our calculations have] to do with not only international norms but also Americaโs core self-interest. Weโve got a situation in which youโve got a well-established international norm against the use of chemical weapons....
[The international norm against the use of chemical weapons needs to be kept in place....
[W]e do have to make sure that when countries break international norms on weapons like chemical weapons that could threaten us, that they are held accountable....
[B]y using chemical weapons on a large scale against your own people ... you are ... breaking international norms....
There is a reason why there is an international norm against chemical weapons.
The professor responded:
The Arab League has not sanctioned an attack. You can't get Security Council approval.... [I]f we do go to war, it will not be a legal war. This is why President Obama talked about norms ad nauseam in his comments and didn't talk about international law, because he knows he can't do this legally.
He added a startlingly unconventional view:
I would like to point out that all of this discourse about chemical weapons being so special is, I think, wrong.... [C]hemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction, like nuclear weapons are. The reason that chemical weapons were not used in World War II wasn't because someone like Adolf Hitler was above using them for moral reasons. They weren't used because they have very little military utility. Anybody who has been in the Army knows that chemical weapons just don't buy you much on the battlefield. And, in fact, the United States used nuclear weapons in World War II. So the norms could not have been very powerful in that war.
He then went for the logical kill ...
But the fact is that the United States has no vested interest in what is going on in Syria. This is not a strategically important country. It's deeply regrettable that people are being killed. It's deeply regrettable that's there's a civil war going on, but it's not the United States' responsibility to get into the middle of it, because every time we do this, we end up in a situation like Afghanistan, a situation like Iraq.
... the coup de grace of which was imbued with the most undeniably troublesome fact of all:
When President Obama was asked what this strike is likely to accomplish, he basically had no good answer to that question.
I have one: Our action will accomplish a reaction.
The hawks, as hawks are wont to do, are treating the situation as though no Syrian (or Iranian or Russian) countermove will be in the offing. We move, Assad is severely chastened, and that's that.
And if you believe that ...