War of "Non-Intervention"

The ludicrous headline of the month goes to Financial Times writer Richard McGregor who claims Barack Obama marshals his forces for war of non-intervention in Syria.

All official US statements, be they on the record or in behind-the-scenes briefings, are peppered with words such as “limited”, “surgical”, and “intermediate”, to emphasise how any action will be quarantined to a few days.

The US-led attack on Syria, in other words, is not about intervening in the civil conflict. It is about not intervening.

The ghosts of Iraq still hover over every decision to go to war, no matter how limited and quarantined the US may want such action to be.

Congress is so wary of having its fingerprints on the issue that its leaders seem more than happy not to have to vote on a Syrian attack. In the House of Representatives, John Boehner, the Republican Speaker, and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, have asked only for consultation.

Perennial hawks such as John McCain in the Senate have long pressed for a more interventionist US role in Syria. “If this isn’t aimed at regime change, then what is it aimed at?” he said with visible frustration on Wednesday.

The US is readying the release of its evidence of the Assad’s regime’s complicity, probably on Thursday, in what Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called “the US intelligence community’s most important single document in a decade”.

Memories of Colin Powell’s now discredited presentation to the UN before the Iraq invasion on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction remain raw in the US system, no more so than in the intelligence community.

As Mr Cordesman says, the US has lost its credibility to assert that Mr Assad ordered the use of the chemical weapons and it will be difficult to regain it with a document that is necessarily constrained about revealing its sources.

“The US government may trust the US government,” he says. “That is not a trust the world shares, and recent polls indicate that it may not be a trust American people share as well.”