Obama and Syria: Decision Day Approaches

Tuesday’s press conference marking the hundred-day mark in Barack Obama’s second term was revealing in many ways. If you are still wondering what sort of character resides behind the cool, detached visage that the forty-fourth President presents to the world, the answer was plain to see: a cool, detached attorney, but one who hasn’t wholly forgotten the idealism that propelled him through Harvard Law School and onto the streets of Chicago’s South Side.

Asked about the tricky case of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his alleged use of sarin gas against his own people, Obama, to the outrage of many armchair interventionists, remarked, “We don’t have chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened”—an answer that could be roughly translated into English as, “Back off, buster. I’m not going to rushed into anything.” But when he was quizzed about the hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay, he dropped the legalese and renewed his calls for the detention center to be closed, saying, “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried—that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”

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