The U.S. "intervention' in Syria

Here we go again.

The United States claims to have incontrovertible evidence that Bashar Assad has used chemical weapons against Syrian villages, but it's not going to present it. Not to the United Nations; not to Congress; not to the public.

The Obama administration isn't even going to say how it collected its data— that's classified. Who were our observers? Where are the air and soil samples we presumably took? What were the coordinates of the attacks?

The only neutral observers on the ground were the U.N. inspectors who visited the alleged sites of the attacks after several days and were withdrawn precipitously under heavy American pressure, and medical representatives from Doctors Without Borders. The former group has yet to issue its report; the latter confirm they saw an unspecified number of persons who had symptoms compatible with a chemical attack.

On this basis, we are about to attack Syria.

Not really war?

Secretary of State Kerry calls this attack a military action, but not "war in a classic sense." Really? If Syrian warships were to appear off our coasts and shell us, would we not call that an act of war? If Syria were our ally and Russian ships were preparing to fire on it, would we not call it war?

Harry Truman described our intervention in Korea as a "police action." The history books remember it as the Korean War. Get a little pregnant, and you never know what happens next.

We've stumbled into this mess for only one reason: Last year, President Obama said that the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war would be a "red line" for us.

McCain's revenge

This was not a policy statement issued after due debate within the administration and appropriate consultation with Congress. It was an off-the-cuff remark by a man who does a lot of casual talking.

That is the President's political problem. America's "credibility" is not on the line in backing his statement up— only his. And even here, he has an alternative: He can go to the United Nations and let that body, including the Russians and the Chinese, discharge its responsibility.

Backed into a corner by his own rhetoric, abandoned by his allies and supported only by France's weak and unpopular president, François Hollande, Obama is now playing a hole card in appealing to Congress to support him. Having made unspecified concessions in private conversations with the Senate's two leading war hawks, John McCain and Lindsay Graham, he will probably get a resolution of some sort giving him a green light to act.

McCain, his own presidential aspirations having been frustrated in 2008, must be relishing the moment that has allowed him to exact terms from the man who defeated him. The rest of us should be worrying.

If this doesn't work….

In his Senate testimony, Kerry suggested that U.S. forces might have to enter Syria to secure chemical stockpiles if Assad were not deterred by our missiles (and perhaps even if he were?). Immediately challenged, he withdrew his comment. Was that just Kerry himself, speaking off the cuff like his boss? We don't know, and no one pressed him further.

Kerry was also asked whether there was any disagreement among the various intelligence agencies that had collected and analyzed evidence about the August 21 attacks. His answer is worth pondering: "Not to my knowledge."

Really? The secretary of State, charged with briefing Congress and making Obama's case for war, doesn't know whether there's any dispute about the evidence supporting it? If that is so, then he has done even less due diligence than Colin Powell did about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction in his infamous U.N. presentation of 2003.

Are these the leaders we should be following into anything? I hate to agree with Donald Rumsfeld, but this is the most feckless and untrustworthy government we've had since— well, since the George W. Bush administration. And a quagmire in Syria could make the Iraq war look like a picnic.