AMERICAN INTEREST
by Walter Russell Mead
September 11, 2014

President Obama is now exactly where we at The American Interest were afraid he would be when the whole Syria mess started: from the beginning it was crystal clear that all his choices were bad and we sympathized with his desire to do nothing—but we also warned that doing nothing was in fact the worst option of all. The longer he waited, the worse all of his options would get. In the end, procrastination would require him to take more action, and riskier action, than early intervention would have entailed, while both he and the country (not to mention the people of the region) would pay a high price for delay.

Sadly, those fears were justified. With his speech on September 10, President Obama acknowledged that the policy of delay has run its course, and he is now setting out to do what not only his critics but his own national security team have been begging for since 2011. The policy of evasion has failed; he is now back to engagement—military engagement—in both Syria and Iraq. The man who wanted to end America’s wars in the Middle East is now wading back in.

The policy of delay bought Obama nothing and cost him dearly. Procrastination was an unmitigated disaster for him, reducing his credibility abroad and his stature at home. He didn’t want to arm the moderates in Syria because he was afraid U.S. weapons would go to ISIS; so the U.S. stayed out, and ISIS swooped across Iraq, capturing more U.S. weapons (and more sophisticated weapons) than any leaks from Syrian Sunnis could have given it. Now, with ISIS sitting on a large U.S. weapons arsenal, President Obama is going to pump more weapons to the “moderates”—a group that is less reliable, in a worse military position, more radicalized, and more factionalized than they were when he first refused to arm them. The President is like a man who refused to jump into what he saw as too deep and dangerous of a hole, and then watched for three years while the hole grew deeper before finally taking the plunge……

READ MORE
http://www.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2014/09/11/a-president-surrenders/