President Hamlet
By JOHN PODHORETZ
He doesn’t know what to do. Of all the issues raised by President Obama’s conduct toward Syria, that is the most worrisome. He’s had a year — a year — to think this through, to consider the options, to consult his advisers, to make plans. And when the moment came, he froze.
His decision over the weekend to seek congressional authorization is a sideshow. Yes, it may prove an instructive sideshow, in that it will force legislators out of the peanut gallery and into the arena where high-stakes decisions are truly made; it will create divisions among Republicans and force Democrats to choose between their anti-war leanings and the president who helped change their fortunes for the better.
Still, the move is indicative not of Obama’s purpose, but rather of his paralysis.
There is an argument that he backed down from unilateral executive action for political reasons. Perhaps — but that would suggest he is a bad politician, and we know he isn’t.
First of all, Obama knows he’ll never again run for president, so the poll numbers showing a distinct lack of enthusiasm for US strikes against the Syrian regime surely don’t concern him as they would’ve in past years, when he was trying to pass ObamaCare or get re-elected.
Second, his case for action, as stated in his remarks over the weekend, is primarily a moral one against the use of weapons of mass destruction. A solid effort to make that case to the American people, which is not so easy to argue with, would surely carry the day.
And when it comes to standing with him or standing with some members of the wildly unpopular Congress demanding he get their say-so first, Obama must know he’d have a greater call on the public’s sympathy. Even more important, Americans may be “war-weary,” as he said on Saturday, but they also rally behind the flag when the nation acts.
So it wasn’t the politics that made him blink. He blinked because he’s uncertain.
Once he induced the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to say it didn’t matter whether he acted tomorrow or months from now, he was surely relieved by the opportunity to delay. (If he hadn’t been, he could have called Congress back into session early, instead of waiting until next week for it to return on schedule.)
In his voice-over prologue to his 1948 film version of “Hamlet,” Laurence Olivier says, “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”
It’s by no means shameful to be likened to Hamlet; after all, Hamlet spoke the greatest poetry ever written in the English language, and his existential torments speak to the deepest truths of human nature. But Hamlet is 20 years old, a college student in shock from his father’s sudden death and his mother’s marriage to his uncle.
He is not a 52-year-old president of the United States, twice elected to that office to lead the nation. And Hamlet didn’t choose to be the vessel of his father’s vengeance; that task was thrust upon him.
But Barack Obama chose twice to seek the presidency — a position that is all about making difficult decisions, especially in the realm of foreign and military policy. The president is tasked by the constitutional structure of the government to think about the national interest in a manner wholly different from the nakedly political calculations of senators and congressmen who are elected not by the country as a whole but by individual states and districts.
They are not suited to make the kinds of calls the president must make. They can’t sift through the options when it comes to the scope of action, the possible targets and the kinds of countermeasures that might need to be taken afterward to negate a response.
It’s hard. No question. But just as no one told him to walk himself into a crisis when he drew a “red line” he had no interest in enforcing, nobody told Barack Obama to be president.
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