Who Was That Masked Persuader?

Before last Friday an Imperial-leaning President was expected to take Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out to the woodshed. He was to brandish the whip of American missile bruising with the reluctant enforcer's decree that this corporal spanking was going to hurt him more than it hurts Assad. And before Labor Day he would have been right. But now we know better.

Obama needed Congress like a hole in the head. Then the British Parliament silenced the alarm clock before Prime Minister Cameron could set it. No point in going it alone when the constitution provided ample cover in the form of a full up or down vote. Regardless of how the votes line up, it is a remarkable thing. The public has so little appetite for war now that it's no longer relevant whether the investigations prove that the evidence was cooked or credible unlike the run up to those elective American wars when it was theories in heads and not facts on grounds that justified the propping up of dictators, dominos, or pipelines.

But the queasy factor hastens another more welcome removal from Congressional deliberations and that's the middle-man who brokers the retail side of a political system that sends anyone who can't afford a lobbyist to the black market for political favors. That's the up-and-up about having the straight up-and-down. There will be no horse trading. We're filibuster free. It is as close to a politically neutral political act that we're likely to see on this side of any foreseeable cycles to come. That's what happens when support for bombing Syria is running neck and neck with Congressional approval ratings. You get one rep, one vote. You get the House leaders voting with their conscience, not with blocs, or caucuses, or factions, or any groups that would threaten not to have them as a member. That’s not a character assassination, a smear campaign, or the guy further to the extreme in the next primary. That's the clout our leaders have when casting a vote for or against this evolving role of American leadership.

President Obama has decided to externalize the arguments in his head, making us all raging argumentarians. Buffering the time-span between the atrocity, the debate, and the pending response could drag on all the way through the upcoming debt threshold season. We may have to DVR those episodes while we stay glued to this wider and more unscripted stage. And here are the fall previews as channeled through a South Park chorus of militant-leaning Sims family combat scenarios:

• Are we only implicated when the shooter takes out our loved ones?
• Does self-interest reside closer to the speculations of cavorting diplomats?
• Are these future gassings are any more predictable if we do the unpredictable and stand down?
• We can’t nurse our veterans or feed our hungry. Can we really afford this? (Queue debt ceiling…)

The President is drawing this out for a reason. He's dragging the entire cast across that red line which marks all borders, colors, and demarcations. He drew that red line in response to having no response for the first hundred thousand or so Syrians being taken at the hand of their fellow Syrians. He drew it on the calculation that he wouldn't need to honor it. It was an election year placeholder. Perhaps a posturing he didn't expect to hold? After all, why would a despot invoke sarin pellets on oxygen-consuming civilians?

Certainly the Iranians who knew the open air gas chambers unleashed by Saddam Hussein in 1980 have a closer affinity to the Auschwitz death camps than any rationale for the one visited on the Damascus suburbs last week. Perhaps these are remnants of the same caches that were used on the holocaust-denying Iranians? In both cases the U.S, turned a blind eye to these weapons of gas destruction. Red lines tend to be made on shifting red sands it seems.   

But argumentation is cheap and Obama spends lavishly, knowing that a week buys him a maelstrom of speculation from decampments of munitions deployed within Syrian population centers to a Republican party united in blame only. If there is to be blood the new calculations on circumscribed warfare is not over munitions, territories, natural resources, or even casualties, but on whose hands their blood will be stained.

During the summer recess Obama was going to be impeached for implementing Obamacare. Now he's melting our soft civil war for the harder one waging on in a fractured, displaced, and stressed out corner of a global neighborhood the “right side of history” was never supposed to enter.

The terms of that entrance will be diluted by the party line progressives (formerly “pinkos”) once, if ever, such a resolution passes the house. And Obama will be publicly circumspect and privately delighted by those constraints. It may sound devious to foes and shrewd to benefactors. But it's certainly a lot less abstract than gassing one’s “own people.” And it’s a lot more achievable than any notions of victory in Syria -- for anyone.