Thursday August 29, 2013 5:35 AM
Barack Obama’s foreign-policy dream — cordial relations with a Middle East tranquilized by “
smart diplomacy” — is in a death grapple with reality. His rhetorical writhings illustrate the
perils of loquacity. He has a glutton’s rather than a gourmet’s appetite for his own rhetorical
cuisine and has talked America to the precipice of a fourth military intervention in the crescent
that extends from Libya to Afghanistan.
Characterizing the 2011 Libyan project with weirdly passive syntax (“It is our military that is
being volunteered by others to carry out missions”), he explained his sashay into Libya’s civil war
as pre-emptive: “I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking
action.”
With characteristic self-satisfaction, Obama embraced the doctrine “R2P” — responsibility to
protect civilians — and Libya looked like an opportunity for an inexpensive morality gesture using
high explosives.
Last August, R2P reappeared when he startled his staff by offhandedly saying of Syria’s poison
gas: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being
utilized.” The interesting metric “whole bunch” made his principle mostly a loophole and advertised
his reluctance to intervene, a reluctance more sensible than his words last week: Syria’s
recidivism regarding gas is “going to require America’s attention and hopefully the entire
international community’s attention.”
Regarding that entirety: If
community connotes substantial shared values and objectives, what community would
encompass Denmark, Congo, Canada, North Korea, Portugal, Cuba, Norway, Iran, Britain, Saudi Arabia,
Poland and Yemen? Words, however, are so marvelously malleable in the Obama administration, the
Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of
coup (“a change in the government carried out violently or illegally”) somehow does not
denote what happened in Egypt. Last week, an Obama spokesman said, “We have made the determination
that making a decision about whether or not a coup occurred is not in the best interests of the
United States.” So convinced is this White House of its own majesty and of the consequent magic of
its words, it considers this a clever way of saying the law is a nuisance.
Section 508 of the Foreign Assistance Act forbids aid to “any country whose duly elected head of
government is deposed by military coup” until the president determines that “a democratically
elected government” has been restored. Secretary of State John Kerry was perhaps preparing to
ignore this when he said something Egypt’s generals have not had the effrontery to claim — that the
coup amounted to “restoring democracy.”
Perhaps Section 508 unwisely abridges presidential discretion in foreign policy, where
presidents arguably deserve the almost unfettered discretion they, with increasing aggressiveness,
assert everywhere. And perhaps if Obama were not compiling such a remarkable record of indifference
to law, it would be sensible to ignore his ignoring of this one.
But remember Libya. Since the War Powers Resolution was passed over Richard Nixon’s veto in
1973, presidents have at least taken care to act “consistent with” its limits on unilateral
presidential war-making. Regarding Libya, however, Obama was unprecedentedly cavalier, even though
he had ample time to act consistent with the Constitution by involving a supportive Congress. As
Yale Law School’s Bruce Ackerman then argued:
“Obama has overstepped even the dubious precedent set when President Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo
in 1999. Then, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel asserted that Congress had given
its consent by appropriating funds for the Kosovo campaign. It was a big stretch, given the actual
facts — but Obama can’t even take advantage of this same desperate expedient, since Congress has
appropriated no funds for the Libyan war. The president is simply using money appropriated to the
Pentagon for general purposes to conduct the current air campaign.”
Obama is as dismissive of red lines he draws as he is of laws others enact. Last week, a State
Department spokeswoman said his red line regarding chemical weapons was first crossed “a couple of
months ago” and “the president took action” — presumably, announcing (non-lethal) aid to Syrian
rebels — although “we’re not going to outline the inventory of what we did.”
The administration now would do well to do something that the head of it has an irresistible
urge not to do: Stop talking.
If a fourth military intervention is coming, it will not be to decisively alter events, which we
cannot do, in a nation vital to U.S. interests, which Syria is not. Rather, its purpose will be to
rescue Obama from his words.
George F. Will writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.
georgewill@washpost.com
