That 2002 Gordon-Miller article was cited by President George W. Bush's aides as a key argument for invading Iraq in 2003. That war is now generally acknowledged to be one of this country's worst and most tragic foreign policy decisions.
On Friday, August 30, 2013, President Barack Obama faced a similar choice Trump has just faced early in his administration.
Should Obama punish Assad for using chemical weapons on his own people, a violation of the red line Obama had drawn, or should he, as Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in the Atlantic, "step back from air strikes and allow the violation of a red line he himself had drawn to go unpunished".
Obama told Goldberg that "today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for me".
"I'm very proud of this moment," he told Goldberg. "The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America's credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically.
And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America's interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I've made--and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make."
This was the moment President Obama believes he finally broke with what he calls, "derisively", the "Washington playbook."
"Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power," he said. "That is the source of the controversy. There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It's a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.
Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don't follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply."
Finally, former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, suggested that one cause of the initial chemical explosion in northern Syria could have been a bomb that struck chemical weapons stored by rebel troops. Here is his interview with BBC:
Obama made the right decision in 2013. Trump has just made the wrong decision, embracing both the revenge of The Searchers, and the media manipulation of Wag the Dog.
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