To postpone a Congressional vote on Syria or not to postpone was the big Beltway question prior to President Obama’s highly anticipated speech on the subject Tuesday night. But after a bit less than 20 minutes of muted and atypically slim delivery, a much more crucial question needed answering: was that speech even all that necessary? Watch for yourself …
It’s one of the most vexing questions of the week, a query that posed itself a day into new diplomatic developments and after another excruciating round of presidential overkill on the media circuit. If average folks weren’t plugged into – at the very least – the fundamental basics of U.S. foreign policy in Syria, by Monday it really should not have been worth White House time and energy. Those comfortably lost in the mass media isolation cell of football and reality show season openers didn’t deserve the extra step of presidential attention – if that was the point of Tuesday night’s speech.
Because, seriously, what did he say that we didn’t already know? What differentiated this speech from six network interviews and what changed the Main Street polling equation in any significant way? What was all that headline-grabbing to justify another rotation of the usual pundits saying the usual things? Why go through all the trouble of using that room? And if you have to talk about it that bad, why not just call a gaggle of reporters into the briefing room and give us a break on the red carpet ambiance?
True: Obama’s clever political navigation through the Syria crisis offers an intriguing glimpse into the truly accidental and fluid nature of diplomacy. There are no real formulas or templates, no predictable plays you can simply snap into the situation. Knowing this, the president appeared to manipulate what he could by a classic run on the clock. It was a glib mix of light intervention, casually pushing military assets into position and keeping his intentions ambiguous. Even when criticized for being too open about the “limited” scope of any forthcoming strike, we never got a real specific sense of what limited meant. There was a lot of bait and switch, a lot of filibustering and a lot of deliberate incoherence. Just talk more, do less. Disarm the opposition with flowery dissertations and testimony about the threat of chemical warfare unhinged, but make as few physical moves as possible unless you really have to.
We have a president that wouldn’t fare too well playing speed chess with the table top hustlers in Lafayette Park (just across the street from the White House for those going ‘huh?’). Instead, he prefers the slow game after dinner and cocktails, examining the pros and cons of every move. By the time he’s made the next move, the opponent is nodding off to sleep. He seems indecisive because he really doesn’t want to make that decision in the first place. The speech, an exercise in futility, not really futile since it was an extension of a more acceptable plan of inaction.
The pure emptiness of it is still, however, part of the strategy. Many of us are lightly irritated because it appeared, at the very least, somewhat boastful and, at most, a real waste of East Wing room electricity. But, for multiple reasons, it served purpose to prop the illusion of “problem solved.” It’s what we’ve come to accept as signature transactional Obama when it comes to the more difficult, seemingly Mission Impossible issues: I’m not breaking it, but I’m not fixing it. He’s like the brother who steps in dog shit on the sidewalk, whispers an indiscernible obscenity and then stealthily finds a patch of grass to scrape his shoe on.
While we shouldn’t underestimate the capacity of this president to use military force, we should recognize that he’s still that candidate who rode to historic victory on an anti-war platform. There’s something very Woodrow Wilsonian in this philosophy and approach. In the case of foreign policy and use of force, he’s not going in unless he sees a clear exit or goal: we might discover from the upcoming Tom Hanks’ Somali pirate hijack thriller Captain Phillips that the president probably didn’t act until he knew for sure Navy SEAL snipers had a clear shot; he didn’t eliminate Osama bin Laden until he knew, for sure, the team he was sending in would get it done and could get out; he wouldn’t go into Libya unless he felt comfortable enough that it would be a clean campaign. While there are always unknowns at work on the battlefield, this particular class of president is not moving in unless he knows the odds favor him. Endless nights of poker as an Illinois state legislator prepared him for that moment.
Moving slow and quietly finding the patch of grass has, however, put the president in a politically advantageous position on his normal quest for win-win. It’s his usual M.O. where nobody really wins, nobody really loses, but everyone is all pissed off: he passed health care reform in a bid to keep his promise, keep his base intact and the opposition fired up enough to recapture the House – even though he struck back with a second term. In the end, he got to pass it, warts and all.
With Syria, he wins because he gets to make a global platitude against chemical weapons – more legacy for the history books. But, he’s also in a position where he won’t use the force he didn’t really want to use in the first place because smart, reasoned defense experts have explained to him that “Syria, Mr. President sir, is just all f****d up.” He made up his mind a while back that he didn’t want to own Syria, but he did want to own a statement on just and unjust wars. And, so, in some ways the “red line” may not have been a mistake. Maybe, after all those long moves and after we all dozed off, he put everything in place to get to this very point.
Sure: some of us could be drinking the Kool Aid or giving Obama too much benefit of the doubt. But, think about it: he ended up not waging a war that he never really wanted in the first place. He says he wouldn’t meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the Edward Snowden scuffle, appeasing grumpy lawmakers who hated getting our nose rubbed in it – but, look what happened: when no one was watching, he ended up meeting with dude anyway. Russia might look like good global Samaritan for the moment, but the White House still gets to say that it was because we made a big fuss over it. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad gets to carry on his war against determined rebels and Islamic militants – but how helpful is that if he can’t use his last-resort weapons when these cats are right on his doorstep? Last we checked, they were still on the outskirts of Damascus. And while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is hot that he won’t get another chance to overcompensate for getting shot down as a young Vietnam War fighter pilot, the president puts just enough assets in the region to keep the old man noisy and non-threatening.
Politically, it doesn’t get any better than that. Obama gets to do what he’s always wanted: channel his inner-Kennedy, crisis averted. Still, in the midst of scraping that shit off his shoe, he could’ve spared us the speech.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a veteran political strategist and Chief Political Correspondent for UPTOWN Magazine. He is the Washington Correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune and frequently heard on SiriusXM. Reach him via Twitter @charlesdellison.
