Roger Cohen is a columnist for the international edition of The New York Times, and he wrote an eye-opening column for Friday headlined “Obama’s Syrian Nightmare.” American readers can find it online, but will its harsh verdict on Obama’s Syria policy make an impact on the overall media tendency to paint Obama’s legacy in happy rainbow colors?
“Syria will be the biggest blot on the Obama presidency, a debacle of staggering proportions,” Cohen began. “For more than four years now, the war has festered. A country has been destroyed, four million Syrians are refugees, Islamic State has moved into the vacuum and President Bashar al-Assad still drops barrel bombs whose shrapnel and chlorine rip women and children to shreds.”
Cohen’s no neoconservative. While he was withering on Syria, he lunged to praise Obama for ending “sterile confrontation” with Iran and with Cuba, for example. Consider this slice of Obama's gushy optimism for Obama in a November 2007 column (when his Times-owned paper was still the International Herald Tribune). This is a journalistic debacle:
Renewal is about policy; it’s also about symbolism. Which brings us to Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic candidate with a Kenyan father, a Kansan mother, an Indonesian stepfather, a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and impressionable experience of the Muslim world.
If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world.
Michael Ignatieff, the deputy leader of Canada’s opposition Liberal Party, said: “Outsiders know it’s your choice. Still, they are following this election with passionate interest. And it’s clear Barack Obama would be the first globalized American leader, the first leader in whom internationalism would not be a credo, it would be in his veins.”
....Obama, in many ways, is where the world is going. He embodies interconnectedness where the Bush administration has projected separateness.
Andrew Sullivan, in a fine piece in The Atlantic, imagines a Pakistani Muslim seeing on television a man “who attended a majority-Muslim school” and is “now the alleged enemy.”
He notes: “If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”
The world isn’t voting. America is. But the candidate who most mirrors the 21st-century world seems clear enough.
Cohen's new pessimism about Obama in Syria underlines a media-goaded foreign policy tendency. Going to war can spur some very harsh media coverage. Non-intervention doesn’t have those media costs, as the networks haven’t filed regular reports from Syria over the last four years. Cohen wrote:
American interventionism can have terrible consequences, as the Iraq war has demonstrated. But American non-interventionism can be equally devastating, as Syria illustrates. Not doing something is no less of a decision than doing it. The pendulum swings endlessly between interventionism and retrenchment because the United States is hard-wired to the notion that it can make the world a better place. Looking inward for long is a non-option for a nation that is also a universal idea. Every major conflict poses the question of how far America should get involved.
President Obama has tried to claw back American overreach after the wars without victory in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has responded to a mood of national weariness with foreign adventure (although Americans have not been very happy with Obama’s pivot to prudence). He has tried better to align American power with what is, in his perception, America’s limited ability to make a difference on its own at a time of growing interdependence. One definition of the Obama doctrine came from the president last year when he declared: “It avoids errors. You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run.” Or, more succinctly, “Don’t do stupid stuff.”
But that’s not enough, as Syria demonstrates.
Obama’s so-called “pivot to prudence” hasn’t been controversial enough to make any stir in his generally positive press coverage. Liberal journalists reflexively think “debacle” can only describe a Bush-Cheney foreign policy, and just can’t apply to this president. Cohen single out exactly where he felt Obama was lacking:
At multiple stages, if Obama could have mustered the will, the belief in American power, there were options. The Syrian aircraft dropping those barrel bombs could have been taken out. A safe area for refugees might have been created. Arming the rebels early and massively might have changed the course of the war. Counterfactuals, of course, don’t carry much weight. We will never know. We only know the facts of the Syrian nightmare now seeping, in various forms, into the West. Syria, broken, will be the rift that keeps on giving.
In Libya, Obama bombed and abandoned. In Afghanistan, Obama surged and retreated. In Syria, Obama talked and wavered. He has been comfortable with the pinpoint use of force — the killing of Osama bin Laden for example — but uncomfortable with American military power.
Syria is the question the Obama doctrine must answer if it is not to be deemed modest to the point of meaninglessness.
