President Obama is right to require conclusive evidence to determine if the Syrian government crossed a chemical weapons "red line." The faulty decisions derived from faulty intelligence in Iraq are testament to the need to get it right.
But Obama need not wait for further evidence to determine the lines Syrian President Bashar Assad will cross in order to defeat the insurgency. Ample evidence from the U.S. government and respected international organizations details the depravity of the Syrian regime.
At minimum, the United Nations estimates that more than 70,000 men, women and children have been killed. Unofficial estimates are much higher. While in no way minimizing the evils of chemical weapons, Ambassador Frederic C. Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who was previously Obama's special adviser for the transition in Syria, put Assad's homicide into proper context in an interview with an editorial writer.
"There is no doubt that the worst thing happening to Syria today has nothing to do with chemical weapons," Hof said. "It has to do with the systematic shelling of residential areas and the terrorizing of their inhabitants by the regime using mortars, artillery, aircraft and scud missiles. … It's running up the body count and is driving people into refugee status."
For multiple reasons, Obama must act. First, if the president's red-line response doesn't match his rhetoric, it may embolden Assad and possibly other rogue regimes such as Iran and North Korea. In addition, Syria's civil war isn't only a massive humanitarian disaster within the country — it's creating a destabilizing refugee crisis in an already volatile Mideast.
And inaction by the international community has meant that the vacuum increasingly has been filled by Islamic extremist groups that could pose an eventual existential threat to other nations, including the United States.
Calls for the United States to intervene by imposing a no-fly zone, or by bombing chemical-weapons sites, are understandable. But it would be naive to assume that such direct military action could be so surgical that there wouldn't be a high risk of being dragged directly into the war.
The United States is simultaneously refining its exit strategy from Afghanistan, witnessing increasing disintegration in Iraq and trying to avoid war with Iran as it seeks a diplomatic route to address that nation's nuclear-weapons capability.
