Rand Paul is committing the same strategic error that Hillary Clinton committed in 2008 (and seems determined to repeat in 2016, thus reducing her core party support): By playing to the general-election crowd before persuading Republican primary voters to his cause, he's adopting a false air of inevitability.
His WSJ op-ed is the latest exhibit--and a slop-studded one at that. For instance he jumps on the POTUS-bashing bandwagon in writing that last "September President Obama and many in Washington were eager for a U.S. intervention in Syria to assist the rebel groups fighting President Bashar Assad's government." Eager U.S. interventionists there were, but of course President Obama was not one of them. He's always been leery of arming Syria's "rebel groups" for reasons too well known to repeat here. Paul also argues that "interventionists are calling for Islamic rebels to win in Syria and for the same Islamic rebels to lose in Iraq," which is an argument steeped in either prodigious ignorance or, more likely, deliberate deceit.
But, this is politics, so Paul's unbroken fidelity to truthfulness is hardly expected. He does, however, fire off a couple of incontestable zingers against his would-be general-election opponent: "Mrs. Clinton was ... eager to shoot first in Syria before asking some important questions," and "We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way." OK, "lucky" is indeed contestable, since "Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way" only because President Obama refused her, which--see second paragraph--Paul pretends not to grasp.
Still, they're good zingers. But there's a problem. Paul isn't running against Mrs. Clinton--not yet anyway. He is running against Mitt Romney and a small army of other pseudoconservative nincompoops who are battling for the honor of losing to Clinton. He might want to concentrate on winning that race first.
There is one other possibility which flips my thesis of strategic error, however, and it is this: The young senator knows that Hillary is unbeatable in 2016, but he's betting that after four years of Her Interventionist Highness the nation will be ready for another neo-isolationist Mr. Republican. This may give Paul too much credit for modesty and strategic forethought, but you must admit that he's often sharper than he at first seemed.