The case for Syria may be worse than Iraq - 0 views
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The Iraq War is casting a long shadow over a potential Syria conflict, as even President Obama had to acknowledge. “[We're] not getting drawn into a long conflict, not a repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about,” Obama told PBS NewsHour Wednesday night. But for all the fears of repeating Bush’s mistakes, Obama is taking the country to war in Syria from an arguably weaker position than Bush did with Iraq 10 years ago. On public opinion alone, they are worlds apart (and this is a democracy, after all, so such things should matter). “Do you think that the United States should or should not take military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq?” a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll asked two days before the bombing began in 2003. A clear majority, 65 percent, said yes, while just 30 percent said no.
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Compare that to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out this morning that found that 50 percent of Americans oppose military intervention in Syria, compared with 42 percent who support it. When asked if the U.S. should prioritize removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power, just 16 percent of respondents said yes. Now even Republicans are turning against a potential attack, Nate Cohn noted. Syria is a historical anomaly here as Americans have generally supported military intervention in recent years, from the humanitarian missions of the 1990s to the Bush wars of the 2000s, to the Libya campaign in 2011.
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Fortunately, there seems to be little appetite in the White House for anything near the scale of Iraq – “just muscular enough not to get mocked,” as an unnamed administration official said — so the actual consequences will never be as bad. But while it’s infuriating that someone like Donald Rumsfeld is criticizing the White House for failing to justify a potential attack on Syria — it puts him in ”the Chutzpah Hall of Fame,” as Steve Benen wrote — it’s even more infuriating that Rumsfeld may be right.
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If you follow the link to the Wall St. Journal/MCNBC poll results, you'll see that while the Syrian intervention got a bump in the polls from the publicity blitzkrieg waged by the Administration, the public is still more opposed than in favor of the action. Other poll results are even more troubling for the Administration, with a very muscular disapproval of Obama's handling of the Syria situation and even a drop in his favorability rating. But the hearing today before the House Foreign Affairs Committee was a real fiasco, even though it's not over yet as of this writing. Kerry, Hagel, and Gen. Dempsey are having a much rougher ride than they did in the Senate committee. Their justifications for the Syrian strike are strictly looney-tunes. Example, Kerry's faux-impassioned argument that the planned military strike is not war, reminiscent of the Administration arguments when Obama launched his regime-change mission against Libya. Not war because no casualties on our side anticipated. As though in both Libya and Syria, no act of war were involved. Dempsey, to his credit, said as he has said before that it would be an act of war. I turned off the TV because of boredom. But my sense is that if this stopped, it will be stopped in the House.