The scenarios at first sound hauntingly familiar: an American president preparing to attack a Middle Eastern country without a United Nations Security Council resolution, without broad international backing and, this time, not even with congressional support.
It's not the position that President Barack Obama ever hoped to find himself in during a presidency he said would be focused on nation-building at home. But mounting evidence that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons – a violation of international law – against his own people appears to have changed the administration's calculus.
Obama has waffled on intervention for months, even after saying a year ago, in August 2012, that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would constitute crossing a "red line" that would force Washington's hand.
White House officials now say the U.S. is ready to pursue limited military strikes in Syria, even with a reluctant Congress at home, and a rebuke from the British Parliament Thursday, rejecting a call for military involvement.
In the Obama administration's maneuvers, some see echoes of the way in which President George W. Bush unilaterally, without a U.N. resolution and despite international critics, marched into war in Iraq in 2003 – a war that ended up costing thousands of American lives, thousands of Iraqi casualties and nearly $1 trillion.
The White House has understandably pushed back against those comparisons, as officials have tried to build support among allies abroad and Congress.
Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that the U.S. had learned its lesson about the faulty intelligence that led to the Iraq War and in assessing the chemical weapons attack, Washington had been "more than mindful of the Iraq experience."
"We will not repeat that moment," Kerry said, adding, "Fatigue does not absolve us of our responsibility."
MORE: U.S. assessment of the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons on Aug. 21
READ MORE: U.S. ASSESSMENT OF THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT'S USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS ON AUG. 21
READ MORE: U.S. ASSESSMENT OF THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT'S USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS ON AUG. 21
One of the most striking differences between 2003 and 2013 is how long the president has resisted getting involved, even as the atrocities mounted and facing pressure from France, the U.K. and Gulf Arab states.
About 100,000 people have died in the bloody civil war that has ravaged the country for two years.
"The president is torn between on the one hand a determination to end U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern wars … and a feeling that he has to do something, that U.S. credibility is on the line, that this is an egregious violation of international norms," said Dominic Tierney, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
"Being torn between those two things is producing this middle path of very limited intervention."
Nonetheless, Obama's own words before he took office are not pretty to revisit in the current context, and seem to run against his preference for multilateralism.
"I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power," Obama said in a speech in 2002.
"I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors."
Five years later in 2007, as a presidential candidate, Obama said in the Boston Globe, "The president does not have power under the constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
Ariel Cohen, Middle East expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that there are some ironies about where Obama finds himself today.
"It is ironic that President Obama and the Democrats criticized Bush for not succeeding in getting a U.N. sanction for the Iraq war," he said.
Several Middle East analysts, including Cohen, however, said the Syria and Iraq situations are not completely analogous.
Obama is not so much contemplating a full-scale war or attempting to install a democracy so much as sending a symbolic message about the use of chemical weapons.
Some said a more accurate historical parallel would be Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign in Iraq authorized by President Bill Clinton in 1998 to degrade Saddam's ability to stockpile weapons of mass destruction.
"The Iraq War was a massive ground invasion, which was planned for months, designed to depose and overthrow a regime. This is not that," said Aaron David Miller, an analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Miller added that Congress has authorized war only five times in history.
"Various administrations have proceeded without congressional authorization," he said. "We have been involved in military actions hundreds of times."
Daniel Byman, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute, similarly said the objectives of the two engagements are fundamentally different.
"I'm not in love with the parallel for a variety of reasons. The obvious one is the Bush administration was going to invade and occupy a country, and Obama is talking about bombing for a couple of days," Byman said.
With plans underway only for a limited strike, the need for broad international support and congressional authorization is less pressing, he added.
Still, bad memories of the Iraq War have undeniably colored Americans' and others views of military intervention, no matter how divergent the circumstances.
"A colleague of mine joked that George Bush lost the vote in British Parliament," Byman said.
There are also unintended consequences to be considered. The Iraq War was not supposed to last 10 years and cost $1 trillion.
"The mission could of course evolve over time and could turn into a regime change operation," Tierney said.
Error
Sorry, your comment was not saved due to a technical problem. Please try again later or using a different browser.