The anticipated American strike on Syria could come tonight or tomorrow, with this article's publication or a few days after it. The timing no longer matters. What matters now, rising above the surface of events, is the fact that Barack Obama's strike against Bashar Assad is inevitably coming. This is the new Obama, whose rough features we have not encountered since his election. We are seeing him today on television screens, wearing the face of George Bush Junior, Bill Clinton and George Bush Senior, as he leads a new adventure on the arenas of the Middle East. Obama did not want to get implicated this way. He avoided it until the moment when avoiding it would have been considered a defeat for America itself, one that could only be matched by a defeat it could suffer in the actual war. Obama sat in his Oval Office at the White House for two and half years, counting the numbers of casualties among the Syrian people in the tens of thousands, the number of wounded in the hundreds of thousands, and the number of those displaced in the millions. The latter have filled the streets of cities, public squares and camps they were able to reach in neighboring countries, from Turkey to Jordan, to Iraq and to Lebanon. What did the President of the United States do this whole time? Nothing! Until a slip of the tongue made him commit the "mistake", on that day in August of last year, of warning Bashar Al-Assad not to cross the "red line" and make use of chemical weapons against his people. Bashar's regime only understood from this that it was a truce-seeking message from Obama, signifying: kill as many as you want and in numbers that do not hurt your "conscience", but use weapons that do not embarrass me before the world, and do not make me seem like the weak president of a strong America. Bashar thought that the cover of protection provided by Russia and the alliance of "defiance", as well as Western powerlessness before excessive killing, only represent license for him to do as he pleases with his people. Are they not his own people, and does he have a choice other than disciplining such a people by all means possible, if they turn into groups of "terrorists"? Bashar left Obama no chance to evade confronting the Syrian crisis. Yet in spite of this, the US President chose the easiest kind of confrontation. He described it himself as a "limited" one, reassuring the Syrian President that his regime would remain, and that his ability to continue killing would not be affected. It is merely a matter of a few cruise missiles to save Obama's reputation on the domestic scene and before his allies, so that it may not be said that the word of the President of the United States has become worthless before the world. From what Obama said on the PBS network last Wednesday, one can conclude a great deal. Doubtless, the Syrian President and his allies have listened closely to what he said and have drawn conclusions that please them. Obama said that this was merely a "signal that in fact [Assad] better not do it again" (meaning not kill Syrians with chemical weapons again), adding with his known eloquence (!) that this "doesn't solve all the problems inside of Syria, and, you know, it doesn't, obviously end the death of innocent civilians inside of Syria". In other words, Obama is begging Assad to understand his "situation". He is forced to "perpetrate" this strike, and hopes that the Syrian President will not embarrass him by using chemical weapons again. There are many other "acceptable" ways to kill Syrians. Please, do not make this mistake again with America's President. His heart is only moved by scenes of the victims of chemical weapons. The American strike is not aimed at changing anything on the ground in Syria, neither changing the balance of power between the regime and the opposition, nor restricting the use of airstrikes and explosive containers – and certainly not toppling the regime. Mistaken are those who compare what Obama intends to do in Syria to what Bill Clinton did after 1995 in order to force the Serbs to negotiate and in order to save Kosovo four years later. It has taken far too long for the Americans to make a decision about Syria, after the viciousness of the regime has become multiplied, after fragmentation within the ranks of the opposition has increased, after it has been infiltrated by all sorts of fighters and "mujahideen" from the four corners of the world, and after a political solution has become out of reach.
