“I wouldn’t go in if I were you,” said one of the undergraduates, Jon Waldon, 22. “Public opinion was against it. Second off, we’re in a lot of debt. Third off, there haven’t been United States citizens targeted in the attack.”

Off campus, the attitudes were similar. Jennifer Taylor said that she was managing the officers’ club at the Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, N.C., and cheering on Mr. Bush when American forces invaded Iraq. But this week, from her spot tending bar at Hot Rod’s, she was decidedly against the use of force in Syria and questioned Mr. Obama’s motivations in proposing it.

“Obama was against” the invasion of Iraq, Ms. Taylor noted, “and I don’t understand why he’s changed his stance.” Seconds later, she offered an explanation: “He’s having trouble keeping his popularity up; this war on guns has made him unpopular. And this is his way of getting back up.”

Indeed, her customer, Mr. Tripp, suggested that the use of chemical weapons was actually a plot by Al Qaeda to lure the United States into toppling the Syrian government, and that Mr. Obama was falling for it. Terrorists will rush into the vacuum once Mr. Assad is gone, he warned.

To be sure, not everyone here believes a strike against Syria is a mistake. “We’re the watchdog of the world, and something’s got to be done,” Blair Zimmerman, a Democrat and a Greene County commissioner — Waynesburg is the county seat — said during a chat in the county office building. “I’m all for missile and airstrikes — but ending it there.”

Perhaps the strongest argument for force came from Rudy Marisa, the retired men’s basketball coach at Waynesburg University. “Somebody has to stop putting a Band-Aid on it,” he said. “It has to be stopped some way, some how. You can take a stand and say, ‘O.K., we’re not going to do this anymore; you guys keep fighting and whatever happens, happens.’ But my opinion is that if we do that and stand back, they’ll come in and take us over.”