What did I say about President Obama's calculus on Syria being driven entirely by a need to save face due to some ill-considered international improv? From the Los Angeles Times:

"One U.S. official who has been briefed on the options on Syria said he believed the White House would seek a level of intensity 'just muscular enough not to get mocked' but not so devastating that it would prompt a response from Syrian allies Iran and Russia.

" 'They are looking at what is just enough to mean something, just enough to be more than symbolic,' he said."

"Just muscular enough not to get mocked." "Just enough to be more than symbolic."

Call it "don't-get-mocked and awe."

This is astonishing -- as much for the substance of the policy as for the fact we have people apparently in the know who are saying these things out loud to reporters. (Perhaps, it's worth observing, because they're hawks who prefer an actually muscular policy and are trying to goad the president into one.)

"Smart power," indeed.

That all this rumination is taking place over more than a week, affording top Syrian officials plenty of time to protect their military assets and their ... backsides, sure looks like confirmation the president chiefly wants to be seen "doing something." If no chemical weapons depots (or few of them) are destroyed, and if Bashar al-Assad and his top aides survive the attack, well, at least we did something.

As I said the other day, if that's the point of this exercise, there is no real point. You don't save face by engaging in a meaningless attack for show, when everyone knows that's what you're doing. And it's far from clear American interests are sufficiently at risk to justify anything more than that.

As Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg puts it:

"There's nothing like acting out of an acute fear of mockery to get you mocked, I suppose. Remember "leading from behind"? This quote ranks up there in the did-someone-actually-say-that category. ... 

" 'Muscular,' by the way, is one of those words -- like 'robust' -- that Washington policy makers use to describe foreign and defense policies that otherwise might not be mistaken for muscular or robust."

Gotta make sure everyone gets the message somehow, since "just enough to mean something" might not actually mean anything.

This kind of "do something, anything" action, like President Clinton's gestures against Osama bin Laden after the U.S. embassy bombings in 1998, is more likely to embolden terrorists and thugs like Assad than to cow them. The chief difference is that, unlike during Clinton's presidency, everyone now knows the terrorists are at war with us. Obama's loose words have backed us into a lose-lose situation, and the least costly loss at this point would be a little bit of the president's personal pride.

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UPDATE at 1:30 p.m.:

It is simply stunning to see all the good liberals on this comment thread who are here convinced that, because Obama is in charge, this is bound to be a well-conducted, righteous war with virtually no risk and success assured.

I would love to know how these good liberals -- who all claim to have opposed the Iraq war -- think they have any intellectual honesty or consistency.

I opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion for many of the same reasons I remain unpersuaded about intervention in Syria. While the regime appears to have committed an atrocity against its people in violation of international conventions, it has been doing so for some time (in Syria's case, by killing tens of thousands of them over the past couple of years via conventional arms, which certainly does not fit with international norms, either). It is not at all clear that a limited strike will punish those responsible or dissuade them from committing the same atrocities in the future. There might have been a time when a limited, surprise attack on Syria's chemical weapons depots and delivery systems might have sufficiently degraded its ability to use those weapons on its own people. If that can still be done, and if we are bound and determined to "do something," then I hope and pray we can do that and be done with it. But it seems highly unlikely at this late date, when we've been rattling the saber and discussing our plans in the news media for more than a week.

Rather, a more extensive intervention would probably be necessary. The problem with a more extensive intervention is it eliminates the faux sense of a "safe war" we've felt entitled to ever since the First Gulf War. It means American soldiers will get shot at, and some of them will die -- and probably more than you might think, because wars don't always (ever?) go according to plan, good intentions and well-laid plans be damned. Consider the way Iraq, after a quick and efficient invasion and toppling of Saddam's regime, became a magnet for foreign jihadis who turned the country into the place where many Americans (and far more Iraqis) were killed.

If American soldiers are going to be shot at and die, we have to ask ourselves: To what end? Is some clear American interest at stake? No. Can we be assured a new regime, were Assad to be ousted, would more favorable to our interests than the current one? No; in fact, it appears almost certain the new regime, already militarily backed by al-Qaida, would be at least as hostile toward us. Consider how things turned out in Libya after our "limited" intervention there to "prevent a massacre."

So, to all the good liberals out there who have suddenly been transmogrified into hawks, I ask: How is this action justified if Iraq was not? And a bonus question: Do you even realize that the liberal "responsibility to protect," championed by our new U.N. ambassador and the ostensible guiding principle behind your sudden conversion to militarism, is cut from much the same cloth as the neoconservatism you so love to hate? The chief difference being that responsibility to protect would dictate that we intervene in even more conflicts around the world? Whatever happened to not being the world's police and focusing on nation-building at home?