Doing Nothing is a Policy

Richard Cohen is unhappy with the Obama administration's refusal to join Syria's civil war:

The administration has trouble speaking because, truly, it has nothing to say. In Syria as elsewhere, it has no policy. It wants only to avoid trouble abroad to produce serenity at home — a nifty aspiration but not really a policy. In Iraq, for example, it capitalized on the long war there by just bugging out. Now Iraq is hurtling toward civil war and the Israelis say that Iraqi airspace is being used by Iran to send weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Iraq war was always a mistake. Now, though, insult is being added to injury.

Afghanistan, too, is a muddle. U.S. forces are staying until 2014 but only because Obama chose the political expedient of a compromise between those who wanted more troops and more time and those who wanted less of both. His foreign policy goal was to jolly his domestic critics. If there is an Obama doctrine, it is to give a good speech, split the difference — and take an early dinner.

But this is nonsense. Obama obviously does have a Syira policy, which is to attempt to restrain Syria's government by talk of red lines and murky CIA actions around its borders, while resolutely not going to war. Cohen may not like this policy, but it just wrong to say that Obama lacks one.

More, describing inaction as "no policy" is a subtle way of reinforcing the Washington push toward always "doing something." The supporters of foreign intervention always use this sort of language; "What is your plan for ending Syria's civil war? What are you doing to do about North Korea's nuclear threat? How can you sit there and do nothing while people are dying!"

The great masters of diplomacy all knew differently. "Most things are accomplished by doing nothing," Talleyrand once remarked.

There can be no good, simple resolution to Syria's disaster. To see why, you have only to look across the border at Iraq, where we spent a trillion dollars doing everything Cohen wants in Syria and more: we overthrew an evil regime, put people we thought were moderate in charge, trained their army and police,  rebuilt their infrastructure -- only to leave a country, in Cohen's words, "hurtling toward civil war." Why does he want to do it over again?