September 27-2013
A major argument used by the Obama Administration to justify its original proposal to bomb Syria was that it was needed to maintain US credibility. Officials said Iran would never believe US threats if the United States did nothing after having said Syrian use of chemical weapons was a red line. Fareed Zakaria (photo), the Indian-born commentator for Time magazine, calls that a crock. “There is a mountain of scholarship in international relations that has carefully examined the notion of maintaining credibility—and most of it concludes that there is little gain in doing something simply to maintain credibility. Countries know that circumstances differ wildly in international relations and that what you might do in one situation says very little about what you might do in another, different situation,” Zakaria wrote.