Glenn Reynolds: Obama's Syrian refugee debacle

When President Obama spoke in Washington about the terrorist attacks in Paris, he was curiously unable to raise much passion. The passion came out only later in Turkey when he started attacking Republicans. Those attacks continued throughout that week, with charges that people who oppose resettling Syrian refugees in America are somehow xenophobic haters who are not in touch with American values.

There are two problems with this line of attack for President Obama. The first is that it isn’t true: The opponents of refugee resettlement aren’t xenophobic haters, but ordinary Americans — and, in fact, include roughly a fourth of the House Democratic Caucus, who voted with Republicans to limit refugee resettlement.

The second problem is that Obama himself is the source of the Syrian refugee crisis. But don’t take it from me. Listen to foreign-affairs expert Walter Russell Mead, an original Obama supporter himself: “To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue," Mead wrote in The American Interest, "one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?”

Mead continued, “Obama’s own policy decisions — allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones — were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American president has made in a long time."

“To think that conspicuous moral posturing and holy posing over a symbolic refugee quota could turn President Obama from the goat to the hero of the Syrian crisis is absurd," Mead argued. "Wringing your hands while Syria turns into a hell on earth, and then taking a token number of refugees, can be called many things, but decent and wise are not among them. You don’t have to be a xenophobe or a racist or even a Republican to reject this president’s leadership on Syria policy. All you need for that is common sense and a moral compass.”

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And Democrats kind of sense this, too, as David Brooks noted on NPR: “For Democrats, I think there's a sense of responsibility here. You know, President Obama waxed self-righteous about the Republican bill and the Republican behavior, but he's made a series of cold and, to me, amoral decisions over the past five years to allow this genocide. And maybe they were the right decisions, but they were not moral decisions.”

Now that those decisions — along with the war on Libya, which toppled strongman Moammar Gadhafi and unleashed chaos in Libya and still more refugees on Europe — are bearing unfortunate fruit, Obama wants to talk about what big meanies the Republicans are.

But reality remains, no matter what you say about it, the same. And the reality is that Obama’s record in the Middle East has been one of unparalleled debacles, of which Syria and Islamic State are perhaps the worst. (How bad? So bad that Jimmy Carter is calling Obama feckless, noting that Obama “waited too long” to address ISIS and commenting that “I noticed that two of his secretaries of defense, after they got out of office, were very critical of the lack of positive action on the part of the president.” Indeed.)

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The truth is, Barack Obama has seemed more interested in “fundamentally transforming” the United States than in looking after our position in the world. As Mead comments, “The flood of refugees is shaking the European Union to its core, and Obama’s policy has cemented perceptions among many around the world that the United States is no longer the kind of useful ally that it once was. France didn’t even bother to invoke NATO’s Article 5 after the Paris attacks; nobody really thinks of President Obama as the man you want at your side when the chips are down.”

Nope. And that damage will persist long after Obama enters his post-presidential retirement. In 2008, a substantial chunk of American voters chose to take a holiday from history and go with “hope and change.” In 2012, they chose to ignore Mitt Romney — whose warnings about everything from Russian adventurism to terrorism in Mali have borne fruit — in order to continue that holiday.

The holiday is over now, and the bills are due. The next president will find undoing this damage a tough job.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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