Brigadier General Salim Idriss, Chief of Staff of Free Syria’s Supreme Military Council, has a question that pretty much says all there is to say:

I don’t understand the West.  Why are all of them just looking on?

There were related questions and answers in the SOI interview:

SPIEGEL: But no one plans to deliver [anti-aircraft missiles] to you out of fear that they could fall into terrorist hands.

Idriss: Terrorists?  We experience terror every day.  A short while ago, I spoke with one of our commanders in the east.  The air force had just bombarded the Euphrates dam again.  If it breaks, billions of cubic meters of water will destroy everything.  Is that not terror?

And

SPIEGEL: One of the West’s fears is that the jihadists could take power if Assad falls.

Idriss: Do you know who vacated their positions in Idlib and Aleppo when a US attack seemed imminent?  The radicals from the “Islamic State.”  Since they have absolutely no interest in the fall of the regime, they thrive in war and profit from our weakness.

But with the West—at least that portion of it represented by the US, the only nation in the West with the physical, if not the moral, capacity to act—having ceded policy vis-à-vis Syria to the Russians, there’s little the West can do other than stand on the sidelines, looking on.

…in his recent New York Times op-ed?  Peggy Noonan has an answer.

Why would Vladimir Putin take such an aggressive tone in parts of a piece supposedly addressed to Americans and supposedly explaining his views on Syria and, more largely, US foreign policy?  …he’s not really writing to America.  He chose as a venue a major American newspaper, but he’s writing to the world.  He is telling the world he knows how to correct America, tell it off, criticize it for its conceit.  And he does it right to their faces, not in a Moscow interview or a St Petersburg speech.  He is rubbing America’s nose in it for the delectation of its friends, occasional friends, foes, and occasional foes.  He wasn’t writing to us at all.  He’s attempting to show the world he’s its reliable voice, its real leader, not those other guys.

Indeed.  Congratulations, President Obama.  You’ve achieved your 2008 campaign goal of fundamentally changing America.  We’ll be years undoing your damage.

In his speech Tuesday night in response to President Barack Obama’s speech concerning Syria, Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) had this to say, among other things:

Some argue that American credibility is on the line, that because President Obama drew a red line…. I would argue that America’s credibility does not reside in one man.

If our enemies wish to know if America will defend herself, let them look no farther than our response to 9/11.  When attacked, we responded with overwhelming force and with the military objective of complete victory over our attackers.

Sometimes.  Our enemies also need only look at the Marine and French paratroop barracks in Beirut, at Somalia, and at Benghazi.  Our responses?  The French bombed terrorist positions in the Bekaa Valley.  The US made no response, and ultimately evacuated our forces from Lebanon.  After terrorists seized and desecrated the bodies of Army airmen from a just shot down helicopter, we left, whimpering, Somalia.  After Benghazi, there was much talk about “bringing the perpetrators to justice,” but our actual deeds throughout the ensuing year have been cover-up of the events leading up to and during the attack and murders—while journalists almost routinely contact members of the attacking forces and interview them.

And in that response with overwhelming force in Afghanistan to which Paul refers, we’ve failed in our “objective of complete victory.”  Al Qaeda is stronger than it was on 9/11, having spread from Afghanistan and a few camps in Saudi Arabia to an area that encompasses the Maghreb, the Egyptian Sinai, Yemen, even to Syria where it’s having an instrumental role in that civil war.  The Taliban, unchanged in its philosophy or methods, is poised to resume domination of Afghanistan upon our imminent departure.  These are not because of American failure of arms but because of an American government that has grown “tired of war” and that is slinking home from the contest claiming victory in the face of these long defeats.

It’s certainly true that Obama’s foreign “policy” has been the muddled mumblings of a school boy unschooled in the ways of the world—on that Paul is absolutely correct, albeit his characterization is more polite than mine—but that only makes the job of dealing with a barbarian’s butchery of children and other civilians with chemical weapons proscribed by the civilized world for nearly a century difficult.  It does not justify inaction.

American credibility is on the line, and from that, our security at home and overseas, along with the security of those of our allies who need our support for their security.