This Administration's Amateur Hour

This was in a mass email yesterday from Doctors Without Borders:

Here is what we know: three hospitals in Syria's Damascus governorate that are supplied by Doctors Without Borders reported to us that they received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms such as convulsions, excess saliva, pinpoint pupils, blurred vision and respiratory distress, in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21.

These patients were treated using Doctors Without Borders-supplied atropine, a drug used to treat neurotoxic symptoms. So far 355 of those patients reportedly displaying neurotoxic symptoms have died. ... Unfortunately, when medical personnel treat patients exposed to a neurotoxic agent, they too are at risk of becoming ill. Sadly, the doctors in one of the hospitals reported that 70 out of 100 volunteers suffered symptoms after direct contact with patients and that one person has died.

However the President may have quibbled when he laid out his "red line" on chemical warfare, it was perceived around the world as "if you do this, we will attack you."

First off, he's faced with the point that support for another war in the Middle East has single-digit approval. He'd probably have more luck proposing to legalize child marriage.

Second, if we've learned anything from the last eleven years of combat in eastern and southern Asia, it has been that intervening in civil wars pretty much only has bad consequences. Neither side has clean hands and that is especially true in Syria, where among the rebels are hardline militant Islamists and al-Qaeda allied/inspired bands.

Third, it's a hell of a lot easier to get into such a war than it is to get out of it. Everyone seems to be more than eager to see us use force, but the same nations and groups calling for us to attack will be the first ones to criticize what comes next. Getting into another war in the Middle East is like wrestling with the proverbial tar-baby (and about as messy). That's a hard lesson that I thought this country had learned after two wars over there, a lesson that the President seemed to have heeded when he wisely let the French and the Brits take point on intervening in the Libyan Civil War.

Fourth, I don't know what our national interest is in Syria. If there ever was a conflict in which the better option was to wait for the noise to die down, this is one. Intervening in the Syrian Civil War will be as pointless as it was to intervene in the Lebanese Civil War thirty years ago.

But here's the real rub: Obama's red line has been crossed and something will have to be done. The United States cannot be perceived as running a bluff. If Obama is bluffing and the Syrians have called it, then what happens when a "red line" is later crossed by another nation? The answer to that, unfortunately, is that if they try to call a bluff and we weren't bluffing, then the chance of another war increases.

It is the wise thing is to never threaten the use of force without first thinking through the consequences of making such a threat. In other words, never bluff and cultivate that reputation.

But we're past that point. And now we're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a pointless war because yet another president engaged his mouth before engaging his brain.

We are so screwed.