The Burns/Novick series on Vietnam is an amazingly vivid and powerful piece of filmmaking. I know it is because I can’t stop watching even though it is giving me nightmares.
One of the running themes of the program is that three American presidents continued to escalate the war and tell the public we were “winning” in spite of strong privately-held doubts because the fear of the consequences of “losing” was just too great. The unspoken conclusion is that if only one of them had possessed the moral courage to stand in front of the escalation train and do what needed to be done, the story would have ended more happily.
That is exactly what Barack Obama did when he refused to enforce the red line, and why takes pride in his inaction, in spite of a foreign policy consensus to the contrary. He could see that a short bombing campaign, by itself, would not bring down the Assad regime, but would lead to demands for further action, which could not logically have been stopped short of an occupation that he was determined to avoid.
Obama was half right. Refusing to bomb wasn’t a mistake. Drawing the line, however, was.