President Obama, the Iraq hawks, and the inevitable dysfunction of any intervention that they wage together.

Reuters

The editors at National Review are again endorsing a war of choice against an ethnically divided dictatorship in a region where their magazine's track record anticipating geopolitical events over the last decade does not inspire confidence. Aside from NR's failure to learn anything from the disastrous Iraq War, the most striking thing about the editorial is its contempt for President Obama. The people behind it want you to know that they regard Obama's behavior on Syria so far to be that of an analytically confused, irresolute buffoon who even now "is asking Congress to choose between unpalatable options." Yet they're still urging Congress to entrust to him the prosecution of a war!

President Obama is meanwhile finding that the bulk of the support he has for intervening in Syria comes from the same people who were behind what he famously called a dumb war. "Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him," Obama said in 2002. "But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history."

Now that Obama favors war against a petty Baathist dictator who developed and used chemical weapons, it is no surprise that the neoconservatives are with him -- which isn't to say that they'll remain an ally no matter how things go in Syria.

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