A Rare Public View of Obama’s Pivots on Policy in Syria Confrontation

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Syrian government troops on Tuesday in the town of Maalula after they beat back Islamist rebels, for whom the town near Damascus is strategically important.

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — When President Obama strode into the Rose Garden last month after a week of increasing tension over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, many assumed it was to announce that the attack that had been broadly hinted at by his own aides had begun. Instead, he turned the decision over to Congress. And when Mr. Obama appeared on television Tuesday night, a speech initially intended to promote force made the argument for diplomacy.

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Over the last three weeks, the nation has witnessed a highly unusual series of pivots as a president changed course virtually in real time and on live television. Mr. Obama’s handling of his confrontation with Syria over a chemical weapons attack on civilians has been the rare instance of a commander in chief seemingly thinking out loud and changing his mind on the fly.

To aides and allies, Mr. Obama’s willingness to hit the pause button twice on his decision to launch airstrikes to punish Syria for using chemical weapons on its own people reflects a refreshing open-mindedness and a reluctance to use force that they considered all too missing under his predecessor with the Texas swagger. In this view, Mr. Obama is a nimble leader more concerned with getting the answer right than with satisfying a political class all too eager to second-guess every move.

“All the critics would like this to be easily choreographed, a straight line and end the way they’d all individually like it to end,” said David Plouffe, the president’s former senior adviser. “That’s not the way the world works for sure, especially in a situation like this. I think it speaks to his strength, which is that he’s willing to take in new information.”

But to Mr. Obama’s detractors, including many in his own party, he has shown a certain fecklessness with his decisions first to outsource the decision to lawmakers in the face of bipartisan opposition and then to embrace a Russian diplomatic alternative that even his own advisers consider dubious. Instead of displaying decisive leadership, Mr. Obama, to these critics, has appeared reactive, defensive and profoundly challenged in standing up to a dangerous world.

“There’s absolutely no question he’s very uncomfortable being commander in chief,” Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, a Republican who worked with the White House to support force against Syria, said in an interview. “In personal meetings, he comes across very confident. I wish I could deliver a speech as well as he does. But it’s like he wants to slip the noose. It’s like watching a person who’s caged, who’s in a trap and trying to figure a way out.”

For good or ill, and there are plenty who argue both points of view, Mr. Obama represents a stark contrast in style to George W. Bush. The former president valued decisiveness and once he made a decision rarely revisited it. While he, too, changed course from time to time, Mr. Bush regularly told aides that a president should not reveal doubts because it would send a debilitating signal to his administration, troops in the field and the country at large.

Mr. Obama came to office as the anti-Bush, his candidacy set in motion by his opposition to the Iraq war amid promises to be more open to contrary advice, more pragmatic in his policies and more contemplative in his decisions. When it came time to decide whether to send more troops to Afghanistan in 2009, he presided over three months of study and debate that even aides found excruciating at times but were presented as a more thoughtful process.

Known as a disciplined candidate and personality, Mr. Obama earned praise for boldness with the daring Special Forces operation in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, although that obscured the months of secret deliberations the public did not see. He likewise expanded drone strikes against people suspected of being terrorists and until recently expressed little doubt about their wisdom and necessity.

“President Obama was elected in part because when Washington followed the conventional wisdom into Iraq, he took a different approach,” said Dan Pfeiffer, his senior adviser. “The American people appreciate the fact that he takes a thoughtful approach to these most serious of decisions.”