He is the “armchair weekend warrior” he once decried.
In Obama’s 2002 speech against the Iraq war, he scoffed at “armchair weekend warriors” who pursue “dumb” and “rash” interventions. As if to punctuate that he has become what he once opposed, Obama went golfing on Saturday right after announcing his plans to bomb Syria. Not even Wag the Dog captured that level of presidential cynicism.
In his 2002 speech, Obama said that “petty dictators” don’t justify military intervention, that Saddam Hussein posed no “imminent threat” to the U.S., that war would divert attention from domestic problems, and that a poorly conceived war would “fan the flames” of the Middle East and make a bad situation worse. Substitute “Syria” for “Iraq” in the speech and one has a decent rejoinder to his Saturday announcement: Assad is a petty dictator; he hasn’t attacked the U.S.; this is a wag-the-dog diversion by a floundering president; the lack of any coherent strategy is sure to destabilize Syria and boost Islamic radicals.
