Obama knows that America has lost its appetite for war

It was to Fort Belvoir that President Barack Obama repaired on Saturday, minutes after he announced that attacks by the Syrian government on a rebel stronghold in Damascus constituted ‘an assault on human dignity’ and a ‘serious threat to our national security.’ By using what the US government says was sarin gas, Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed a ‘red line’ that Mr Obama had laid down a year before. The President has asked Congress to authorise an attack on Syria as soon as legislators return on 9 September.

Fort Belvoir is home to the US army’s 29th Light Infantry Division. More to the point, it is the site of a terrific 18-hole golf course, and the President had a mid-afternoon tee-time with the Vice President. Mr Obama, unlike his predecessor, is not going to rush off to war.

But only because he has just suffered the most stinging political setback of his presidency. Rushing to war is just what Mr Obama wanted to do. He is not asking for authorisation on Capitol Hill out of constitutional scruples. Nor is he turning the tables on a bunch of carping congressmen who must now put up or shut up. Nor is he showing ‘boldness’. He is reading the polls. Mr Obama, whose Silicon Valley backers have provided him with the most sophisticated understanding of voter sentiment that any candidate has ever had, has discovered the country has lost its appetite for following presidents on Middle Eastern adventures. Almost 60 per cent of Americans oppose intervention in Syria, the Washington Post found this week. They are not unmoved by the televised images of swooning children. They are sympathetic to the argument that a failure to rein in Syria will make it harder to stymie the nuclear programmes of Iran and North Korea. But they are beginning to worry that the man they elected to end what he called a ‘dumb war’ in Iraq is about to blunder into one himself.