The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Reductio ad Obama
President Obama has confirmed the suspicion that his decision to ask Congress for authorization before using force in Syria was a political ploy. “I’ll repeat something that I said in Sweden,” he said this morning (U.S. time) at a press conference in St. Petersburg, Russia. “I did not put this before Congress, you know, just as a political ploy or as symbolism.”
“Just” is the tell.
We hadn’t noticed his saying that at Wednesday’s Stockholm press conference, where his brazenly false assertion that “I didn’t set a red line” got most of the attention. We went back and checked the transcript, and it turns out he said something similar, but he didn’t use the phrase “political ploy”: “And I would not have taken this before Congress just as a symbolic gesture. I think it’s very important that Congress say that we mean what we say.”
To “say that we mean what we say” is to beg the question–and yes, we mean that in the rigorous logical sense of engaging in circular reasoning. A says something. B asks A if he means what he says; A says yes. B asks A if he means what he says when he says he means what he says; A says yes again. B asks A if he means what he says when he says he means what he says when he says he means what he says; A says yes again. B asks A . . . (Meanwhile, Bashar Assad is repositioning his military assets and preparing for a counterattack in case A and B ever get tired of this nonsense and decide to do something.)
If A meant what he said in the first place, his repeated assertions to that effect are redundant. If he didn’t, they’re redundant too, as the insincerity of the original statement carries over to the assurances that he meant what he said. Thus the statement “we mean what we say” is entirely superfluous as a matter of logic.
So why does anybody ever say “I mean what I say” or “I meant what I said”? For psychological reasons–to allay doubts about one’s sincerity. But to allay doubts is also to acknowledge them. Thus often a statement like “I meant what I said” reinforces a skeptical listener’s impression that the speaker is insincere. That’s even more true when the statement expressly formulates the doubts so as to deny them, as in–to take an example completely at random–“I did not put this before Congress, you know, just as a political ploy or as symbolism.” For this columnist, that statement was a reminder that we had used the exact phrase “political ploy” on Tuesday.
It’s astonishing how much of the administration’s case for military intervention in Syria is tied up in nots. Here are some excerpts from Obama’s press conference today:
You know, over 1,400 people were gassed. Over 400 of them were children. This is not something we’ve fabricated. This is not something that we are looking–are using as an excuse for military action.
As I said last night, I was elected to end wars, not start them. . . .
And the question for the American people is, is that responsibility that we’re willing to bear. And I believe that when you have a limited, proportional strike like this, not Iraq, not putting boots on the ground, not some long, drawn-out affair,not without any risks, but with manageable risks, that we should be willing to bear that responsibility.
Here’s Secretary of State John Kerry in an interview yesterday with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:
Now, most importantly, Chris, we’re not remotely talking about getting America involved directly in between any of those forces. The president is not talking about, uh, assuming responsibility for Syria’s civil war. . . .
Let me just say that, very simply, the president is not asking Congress to authorize him militarily to engage in that transition [to a new regime in Syria]. . . .
I can guarantee you, I’m not imprisoned by my memories of or experience in Vietnam, I’m informed by it. And I’m not imprisoned by my memory of how that evidence [regarding Iraq] was used, I’m informed by it. And so is Chuck Hagel. And we are informed sufficiently that we are absolutely committed to not putting any evidence in front of the American people that isn’t properly vetted, properly chased to ground and verified. . . .
There will be no American boots on the ground. This is not Iraq. This is notAfghanistan. This is not even Libya. . . . I believe this is enforcing a very limited military action, not going to war.
And of course the classic example from the president’s Wednesday press conference: “I didn’t set a red line.” Which brings us back to his assertion in the same press conference that “I think it’s very important that Congress say that we mean what we say.”
Obama loves to speak in the first-person singular; he seems oblivious to the obnoxiousness of his habitual references (including one in today’s press conference) to “my military.” But suddenly it’s a matter of whether we mean what we say.
It’s the same dodge as “I didn’t set a red line.” In reality, as we noted Wednesday, Obama did introduce the idea of “a red line,” and his subordinates later affirmed that he had thereby set such a line. Obama is using the first-person plural to obscure what he’s really doing by asking lawmakers for approval: demanding that they say that they mean what he said. He blundered into a policy by speaking carelessly, waited months before thinking through its implications, then made a decision. He believes he has the authority to carry out that decision on his own, but apparently is unwilling to do so unless Congress affords him political cover.
In today’s press conference, right after declaring that “I was elected to end wars, not start them,” Obama went on to make a general case for intervention:
But what I also know is, is that there are times where we have to make hard choices if we’re gonna stand up for the things that we care about. And I believe that this is one of those times. And if we end up using the U.N. Security Council not as a means of enforcing international norms and international law but, rather, as a barrier to acting on behalf of international norms and international law, then I think people rightly are going to be pretty skeptical about the system and whether it can work to protect those children that we saw on those videos.
And sometimes the further we get from the horrors of that, the easier it is to rationalize not making tough choices. And I understand that.
This is not convenient. This is not something that I think a lot of folks around the world, you know, find an appetizing set of choices.
But the question is, do these norms mean something? And if we’re not acting, what does that say? You know, if we’re just issuing another statement of condemnation or passing resolutions saying “wasn’t that terrible?”
You know, if people who, you know, decry international inaction in Rwanda and, you know, say how terrible it is that there are these human rights violations that take place around the world, then why aren’t we doing something about it?
And they always look to the United States. Why isn’t the United States doing something about this? The most powerful nation on Earth. Why are you allowing these terrible things to happen?
And then if the international community turns around when we’re saying it’s time to take some responsibility and says, “Well, hold on a second, we’re not sure.”
That erodes our ability to maintain the kind of norms that we’re looking at.
Does that sound familiar? This columnist, among many others, made substantively identical arguments in 2002 and 2003 in support of the proposition that America should liberate Iraq. Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 in substantial part because he rejected those claims from the start. As we noted Tuesday, he scoffed in 2002 at the argument that Saddam’s human-rights violations justified U.S. action, and in 2007 he suggested that it was wrong to intervene anywhere unless one was prepared to intervene everywhere.
If Obama has consistently meant what he said–both the callous sophistry of his pre-presidential pronouncements and his assertion today about America’s obligation to act, even without international support, in the face of human-rights abuses–he has undergone one hell of a conversion. And maybe he has, although it would be easier to credit his sincerity if he offered some explanation for the turnabout.
The problem is that Obama’s high-minded pronouncements now are at odds with the logic of hispresidency. He was elected precisely because Americans–having borne a heavy burden for, as Obama put it today, “making hard choices if we’re gonna stand up for the things that we care about”–were no longer willing to do so.
“History should hold him accountable for the current muddy debate over what to do in the face of a state-sanctioned mass killer,” argues the New York Times’s Timothy Egan. The antecedent is not Obama but his predecessor:
Blame Bush? Of course, President Obama has to lead; it’s his superpower now, his armies to move, his stage. But the prior president gave every world leader, every member of Congress a reason to keep the dogs of war on a leash. The isolationists in the Republican Party are a direct result of the Bush foreign policy. A war-weary public that can turn an eye from children being gassed–or express doubt that it happened–is another poisoned fruit of the Bush years. And for the nearly 200 members of both houses of Congress who voted on the Iraq war in 2002 and are still in office and facing a vote this month, Bush shadows them like Scrooge’s ghost. . . .
At the least, when the main cheerleaders for the last war talk about what to do now, they should be relegated to a rubber room reserved for Bernie Madoff discussing financial ethics or Alex Rodriguez on cheating in baseball.
Liberals are awfully illiberal in their demands that certain people just shut up (or be made to shut up). But Egan turns out not to mean it. He directly contradicts it in an astonishing coda:
The voice that stands out most by his silence, the one that grates with its public coyness, is Bush himself. He has refused to take a side in the Syrian conflict. The president, he said, “has a tough choice to make.” Beyond that, “I refuse to be roped in.”
This is cowardice on a grand scale. Having set in motion a doctrine that touches all corners of the earth and influences every leader with a say in how to approach tyrants who slaughter innocents, Bush retreats to his bathtub to paint.
Here is the tragic logic of Obama’s presidency: Americans were, not unreasonably, unhappy with the results of George W. Bush’s wartime leadership. Obama spoke the truth when he said that “I was elected to end wars, not start them.” The current ineffectuality of American foreign policy is in substantial part a consequence of actions undertaken by the Bush administration. Egan presents that argument in an emotional and oversimplified way, but the underlying claim is true.
Yet he ends by vilifying Bush for failing now to step in and somehow fill the leadership vacuum that was left in the wake of his presidency. Egan’s nostalgia for presidential leadership is a powerful acknowledgment, if an implicit one, of Obama’s incapacity to lead.
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