Have America's 'red lines' all been erased?

As of this writing, the astonishing run-up to possible military action against Syria appears to be reaching some sort of anti-climax.

There had been a good deal of huffing and puffing that the Syrians have been caught red-handed (again) gassing their fellow citizens. But at the same time, there is gathering sentiment in the pro-Arab media, including the usual dovecotes in the BBC, that the evidence of gas attacks might have been planted by the anti-Assad rebels to enflame world opinion. All the shilly-shallying of other recent wars is being re-enacted to create a set of reservations that justify doing nothing.

It is not the decision to do nothing that should be annoying. Rather, it is the lack of any kind of definitive decision one way or the other.

Barack Obama has positioned cruise missile-equipped vessels off the coast of Syria that could deliver conventional warheads precisely on Syrian targets. Yet as he has done this, he has engaged in vigorous public discussion about the dangers that would await the United States in Syria. Last week, for instance, he told CNN that he was wary of "being drawn into very expensive, difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment in the region."

It is an unusual (and, among the leaders of Great Powers, probably unprecedented) gambit, to muster a nation's war-making potential while publicly musing on the inadvisability of engaging in war-like acts. It is the ultimate spectacle of the narcissist: All the world must watch while I pull the petals off this daisy. As Bret Stephens wrote in a brilliant piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, this U.S. administration seems to have extreme difficulty distinguishing between a foreign policy and an attitude.

Since the Korean War, the United States has developed an idiosyncratic, and sometimes neurotic, process of making war. In the terrible debacle in Vietnam, force levels in a combat zone were raised to 550,000 draftees, with the Americans regularly taking 200 to 400 dead per week, on dubious legislative authority. The war was ambivalently pursued and militarily mismanaged. In the aftermath, all ability to enforce the peace agreement was cut off, dooming the entire effort and condemning millions of Indochinese to a gruesome fate.

In the first Gulf War, following the naked aggression of Saddam Hussein in invading and occupying Kuwait, a mighty alliance was assembled, 957,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen were transported to the approaches to Iraq and armed to the teeth. The war cleared Iraq out of Kuwait, and the record for the disparity of casualty levels between two fighting forces — previously set at the nearby Battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great — was surpassed. (Alexander allegedly took 1,300 casualties in killing 50,000 Persians and capturing 300,000, a considerable feat with swords, spears, and arrows; while the Gulf War Allies suffered a thousand casualties while killing, wounding, and capturing about 350,000 Iraqis.) But Saddam was allowed to continue as Iraqi dictator. He violated almost all the terms of the ceasefire, Iraq's Kurds were violently subdued despite the imposition of a no-fly zone, and Saddam strutted about the Arab world as a virtual David against the great American-headed Goliath.

In the Bosnian conflict, after the Europeans got over the hubristic illusion that it was "the hour of Europe," Republican Senate leader Robert Dole denounced the European arms embargo, correctly, as a plan to enable the Serbs to massacre their designated opponents, and pushed the U.S. into the conflict with his lift-and-strike legislation. President Bill Clinton and his advisers then developed the dubious concept of the war worth killing for, but not worth dying for: Allied aircraft flew at 30,000 feet to avoid any possibility of ground-to-air fire from the Serbs while bombing that country into backwardness, and the commander-in-chief publicly wept when one American airman's plane crashed and he was captured alive by the Serbs. On this arithmetic basis, many of the world's greatest statesmen, including Lincoln, Churchill and Roosevelt, would have drowned in their own tears. (To make the Clintons a matched pair in histrionics, Hillary Clinton fantasized that she had been under heavy sniper fire at Sarajevo airport while being presented with posies by curtsying schoolgirls — and later attributed this complete fabrication to jet lag).

As terrorist outrages against the United States occurred in the late 1990s (the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996; the bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998; and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen, in 2000), the Clinton administration responded with half-measures: cruise missile attacks that rearranged the rubble around an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and took the roof off an aspirin factory in Sudan. Such feeble gestures later prompted George W. Bush to say: "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.") This under-response led directly to the 9/11 attacks and the Iraqi and Afghan actions that followed.