Peggy Noonan: A point on how quickly public opinion has jelled. There is something going on here, a new distance between Washington and America that the Syria debate has forced into focus. In the Syria argument, the moderating influence is the public, which doesn't seem to have even basic confidence in Washington's higher wisdom.

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

 

Twelve years of war. A sense that we're snakebit in the Mideast. Iraq and Afghanistan didn't go well, Libya is lawless. In Egypt we threw over a friend of 30 years to embrace the future. The future held the Muslim Brotherhood, unrest and a military coup. Americans have grown more hard-eyed—more bottom-line and realistic, less romantic about foreign endeavors, and more concerned about an America whose culture and infrastructure seem to be crumbling around them.

The administration has no discernible strategy. A small, limited strike will look merely symbolic, a face-saving measure. A strong, broad strike opens the possibility that the civil war will end in victory for those as bad as or worse than Assad. And time has already passed. Assad has had a chance to plan his response, and do us the kind of damage to which we would have to respond.

There is the issue of U.S. credibility. We speak of this constantly and in public, which has the effect of reducing its power. If we bomb Syria, will the world say, "Oh, how credible America is!" or will they say, "They just bombed people because they think they have to prove they're credible"?

We are, and everyone knows we are, the most militarily powerful and technologically able nation on earth. And at the end of the day America is America. We don't have to bow to the claim that if we don't attack Syria we are over as a great power.

Are North Korea and Iran watching? Sure. They'll always be watching. And no, they won't say, "Huh, that settles it, if America didn't move against Syria they'll never move against us. All our worries are over." In fact their worries, and ours, will continue.

Sometimes it shows strength to hold your fire. All my life people have been saying we've got to demonstrate our credibility—that if we, and the world, don't know we are powerful by now we, and they, will never know.

 

A point on how quickly public opinion has jelled. There is something going on here, a new distance between Washington and America that the Syria debate has forced into focus. The Syria debate isn't, really, a struggle between libertarians and neoconservatives, or left and right, or Democrats and Republicans. That's not its shape. It looks more like a fight between the country and Washington, between the broad American public and Washington's central governing assumptions.

 

I've been thinking of the "wise men," the foreign policy mandarins of the 1950s and '60s, who so often and frustratingly counseled moderation, while a more passionate public, on right and left, was looking for action. "Ban the Bomb!" "Get Castro Out of Cuba."
 

In the Syria argument, the moderating influence is the public, which doesn't seem to have even basic confidence in Washington's higher wisdom.