Barack Obama’s impending departure from the White House has put many Americans in an elegiac mood. Despite an average approval rating of only 48 percent — the lowest, surprisingly, of our last five presidents — he has always been beloved, if not revered, by the scribbling classes. Just as many prematurely deemed Bush the worst president ever, so many are now ready to enshrine Obama as one of the all-time greats.
Or at least they were until the fall of Aleppo.
Since the Syrian uprising began in 2011, Americans have regarded the carnage there as essentially a humanitarian disaster. For Obama, contemplating his legacy, the awful death and destruction that Syria has suffered — the 400,000 deaths, the wholesale wasting of civilian neighborhoods, the wanton use of sarin gas and chlorine gas and barrel bombs, the untold atrocities — has raised the old question of how future generations will judge an American president’s passivity or ineffectuality in the face of mass slaughter.
Perhaps Obama has been hoping for a dispensation, since presidential reputations have never suffered much for such sins of omission. With a few notable exceptions, biographies, textbooks, obituaries, and even public memory have dwelled little on George W. Bush’s inaction in Darfur, Bill Clinton’s floundering over Rwanda, George H.W. Bush’s dithering about Bosnia, Jimmy Carter’s fecklessness in Cambodia, Gerald Ford’s cold realism toward East Timor, or Richard Nixon’s complicity in Bangladesh. “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler reportedly said in 1939, predicting that the world’s amnesia about the Turks’ mass killings should allow his armies to proceed in all ruthlessness without fear of judgment. We might think of those words in considering how little attention in our history books is given to our presidents’ very limited roles in standing up to atrocities overseas.
And yet now, as Obama’s presidency winds down, and a ceasefire begins to take effect Syria that Washington played no role in negotiating, it’s becoming clear that the loss of life and the humanitarian crisis represent just the first of many consequences that historians will have to assess as they ask how the United States, under Obama’s leadership, chose to deal, or not to deal, with the Syrian Civil War. And if historians tend to give presidents a pass on failing to arrest slaughter, they are not so generous in evaluating the loss of American influence around the world.
More from David Greenberg at Foreign Policy
Perhaps Obama, like most liberals, relies on the re-writing of history to record his past, not the record of his actual actions. I mean, hell, he can stand before cameras and microphones and say, with a straight face, that there have been no terror attacks in the US during his administration. He claims he has improved race relations. Heck, he would have no problem saying the ocean is the sky and the sky is the ocean, since no media worm would have a question on the matter.
He’s a liar because he gets away with it.
Name a leadership strategy where the leader lead from behind! None that were successful. Obama is like a childlike in his understanding of the world and how it works. He goes out to play like a child even though the games he plays are adult games. There is no subtlety in his get even efforts. His interests are only about himself like most children. Soon he can return to his job as a community organizer where he can play his childish games again with those foolish enough to play with him.
Hopefully he will slither back to Chicago where he can continue to be the beacon of progress in reigning in the wanton black on black slaughter. The Chicago statistics are pulling down all the stats of all our other loser cities.
Who knows where his magnificence will take Chi town?
@Marine72: With Trump taking over, he might start to put a little pressure on law enforcement in Chicago to make them enforce the law. Most of the problem is associated with illegal aliens running wild. Maybe he can start applying the law.