War horror and peace can come from verbal missteps

Even wartime hero Winston Churchill knew the value of diplomacy, with his belief that "to jaw-jaw is better than to war-war" .PHOTO/FILE

This year's commemoration of 9-11 was almost completely overshadowed by America's rush to war with Syria, a bombing attack which most in the administration and its adherents found difficult in calling what it is - war.

The President spoke to the nation on the eve of 9-11 and laid out his case for bombing Syria. Though he acknowledged Iraq and Afghanistan, he seemed to shy away from the term "war" only using it to describe Americans as war-weary.

The major thrust of his argument was an emotional one: gassing hundreds of one's citizens, especially children, is horrific. Everyone would agree with that. Even Assad, who claims he didn't do it. What's harder to accept is the President's argument that leads from this terrible use of weapons to the consequences of not acting. Barack Obama described an inevitable progression of chemical attacks and weapons transfers that would inevitably lead to their use against Americans. At this point serious doubts set in - not only because this was conjectural.

He had created a false dichotomy. "It's war or nothing" completely eliminates diplomacy or any other alternative response to this horror - helping alleviate the refugee crisis, for example. This reasoning sounded so like the domino theory that led us into Vietnam. Or Iraq for that matter ... "We've got to stop terrorists over there or we'll be fighting them over here."

Partly as a result of such past misrepresentations by American presidents justifying war, this president has a credibility gap. He needed to overcome that past history of falsehoods to persuade Americans and the world that this path to war was the only correct one. He failed to make that case because his own rhetoric betrayed him. Obama said that America had a responsibility because of its power, to enforce the international norms against the use of chemical weapons.

This rang hollow along with his own refusal to take legal steps against those in the previous administration who authorised and used torture or rendition of suspects to torturers elsewhere - including Syria.

Critics of the President's war plan argued that people are just as dead from conventional weapons. The civil war in Syria has resulted in 100,000 such deaths. Worse, there seemed to be no plan B other than assurance given to the American people that "there would be no [American] boots on the ground." To anyone who has lived through American involvement in another civil war - that in Vietnam - those words were not reassuring . The serious possibility of the widening of the conflict to surrounding countries seemed like a more realistic appraisal than Obama's.

How did anti-war candidate Obama get to this precipice of war? Through President Obama's own casual response to reporters' questions in August 2012, he said then that movement or use of chemical weapons would constitute a "red line". While Obama had been trying to eat those words or share the resultant commitment with Congress, the war talk began there. Just as the plan for negotiations began with Secretary John Kerry's answer to a reporter that Syria could avert war by giving up its chemical weapons. We came close to immediate war with verbal missteps and backed out of it, hopefully, with further verbal accident.

There is some good to be found here. Obama, while claiming the power to go to war, chose, instead, to go to Congress. Presidents have ignored that nicety in the past to their detriment and that of the country. For 50 years America has used its military might in numerable wars without much success - especially in the Middle East.

By contrast , US diplomacy has resulted in peace between Israel and Egypt, the Good Friday Accord in the North of Ireland and the Dayton Accords that ended the Serb-Bosnian conflict. If war doesn't work so well maybe it's time for diplomacy. Even bellicose Winston Churchill said it: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war".