George Will, ex-globalist

Obama is right on Syria

He eventually realized we ought to just give up the on-the-ground warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq and continue with a kind of off-shore drone war.

This was some years ago when his party was still gung-ho for both wars, with boots on the ground, surges, and all that sort of thing.

And now?

Reading this piece, I think we may yet see him join Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, advising the US to get out of NATO, the Middle East, and the Far East, besides.

As to the present case, he writes against intervention,

People who talk incessantly often talk imprecisely, and Barack Obama, who is as loquacious as he is impressed with his verbal dexterity, has talked himself into a corner concerning Syria and chemical weapons.

This is condign punishment for his rhetorical carelessness, but the nation’s credibility, not just his, will suffer.

His policy is better than his description of it, and his description is convoluted because he lacks the courage of his sensible conviction that entanglement in Syria would be unwise.

But when has Barack Obama had the courage of any convictions, his own or those of someone else?

Someone else like ex-pastor Wright or ex-chum Bill Ayers, for instance?

Does he even really have convictions?

Maybe that’s too strong a word, for this guy.

Maybe all he has ever had were ambitions.

This is the guy who openly pledged war side-by-side with South Korea if the North invades.

I hope he didn’t really mean that, either.

It would be nice to think he was just bluffing and knew what his move would be if his bluff was called.

But I don’t think that.

And I don’t think that about Syria, either.

Again and again, he’s a guy caught by surprise, without a plan.

Totally disbelieving in war, he has not the conviction to insist on the only sure and safe path to peace, openly leading America to withdraw from its way over-extended and foolish globalism.

Instead, he pretends to be ready to fight more silly wars and hopes he can get away with it because leading a political battle against them was never what he wanted to do with his time in the White House.

LBJ didn’t really want war in Vietnam, either.

But he lacked the conviction for the political battle it would have taken to stay out.

Getting America to back away from the stupidities of global containment was no part of what he wanted to do when he took the oath.

He certainly didn’t want his presidency to be irrevocably and nearly exclusively about that, as it would have been had he dared to even try.

Oh, when was the last time you saw a leading conservative, a leading Republican, say the US ought to give up being a super-power because we can't afford it?

What?

We can't afford war?

Well, George Will says it in this piece.

Amazing how many other columnists in WAPO are itching for US intervention in Syria.

As is their editorial board.

War after war after war.