Obama’s credibility is at stake — in a way that goes far beyond domestic politics. | AP Photo Iraq haunts Obama's Syria choices

President Barack Obama’s response to increasing evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria seems to have as much to do with Baghdad as with Damascus.

The ghosts of the Iraq War weigh heavily on the president and his top advisers handling the Syria crisis, according to former officials and analysts close to the administration: They don’t want to get it wrong. They don’t want to move too quickly. They don’t want to spend the second term getting embroiled in toppling another Middle East dictator and cleaning up the aftermath after spending the first term getting untangled from the last war.


Thursday, the administration joined Israeli and European intelligence in saying there was some evidence that President Bashar Assad did use sarin. That left them balancing all those concerns against Obama’s repeated vows that the use of nerve agents or poison gas by Assad’s regime would be a “red line” and a “game changer” that would force the U.S. to have a stronger reaction to the ongoing conflict than it’s had for over two years.

( Also on POLITICO: W.H. in political bind over Syria)

“It has to be a factor,” Greg Craig, who served as a foreign policy adviser on Obama’s 2008 campaign and as his first White House counsel, said when asked about the impact of the Iraq history. “He does not want to jump to conclusions or shoot from the hip.”

As officials consider the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that chemical weapons were likely used in Syria, Obama aides have firmly in mind Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet’s 2003 statement to President George W. Bush that it was a “slam dunk” to conclude that Iraq had nuclear weapons. No such weapons were ever found.

In an even more direct parallel to Syria, the CIA also reported that Saddam Hussein had an active chemical and biological weapons program. That, too, turned out to be off the mark.

( Also on POLITICO: Syria, sarin intel known last week)

”I think they’re right to be careful and cautious on this because the intel can be wrong, as we’ve learned in Iraq,” said Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger, now with the Albright-Stonebridge Group.

“This is actually pretty good example of the kind of situation where it pays to learn the lessons of Iraq,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert with the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “My sense is that they are reluctant to get involved on the basis of evidence that is not, to use a familiar term, a ‘slam dunk.’”

A White House official who briefed reporters on the Syria issue Thursday never used the word “Iraq,” but the lingering impact of that conflict was clear.

“Given our own history with intelligence assessments, including intelligence assessments related to weapons of mass destruction, it’s very important that we are able to establish this with certainty and that we are able to present information that is airtight in a public and credible fashion to underpin all of our decision-making,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That is, I think, the threshold that is demanded given how serious this issue is.”

The challenges that U.S. troops did find in Iraq are also a key factor — perhaps the central factor — in Obama’s wariness about getting more deeply involved in Syria by directly arming rebels or setting up a no-fly zone. After some predicted American troops would be greeted with roses, the conflict turned out to be a quagmire that took the U.S. five years to extract itself from — and played a central role in delivering Obama to the Oval Office.

A former senior intelligence official said that the president’s lack of desire to follow through on his red line vow is prompting added skepticism from the White House.

“This is what an intelligence official would call the phenomenon of the unpleasant fact,” the former official said. “When you’re coming in there with bad news, the burden of proof is a lot heavier than when you’ve got good news.”

The White House’s call for an “airtight” case is likely, and perhaps intentionally, asking more from the intelligence community than they can deliver, the ex-official added.

“If they’re looking for ‘airtight,’ they better not be talking to their intel people,” he said. “It’s just really hard to get into that zone.”

Even some analysts who believe Obama has been right to resist calls for U.S. intervention believe the White House is now playing for time.

“They’re delaying by looking for hard proof of exactly what happened, but that does not remove the hard question of what do you do when you get the hard proof,” said Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The answer is going to be very hard for them, because I think they will find there’s been some usage and will feel they have to take some kind of miltary action and they will try to do the least possible to send the necessary message.”

In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the Bush Administration used U.N. weapons inspectors to try to make the case that Saddam Hussein posed a threat. Now, the Obama Administration is urging Syria to admit U.N. investigators without preconditions to explore possible chemical weapons use.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) suggested Thursday that the Obama administration’s call for U.N. verification might be a way of fudging on the president’s vow to act if chemical weapons were used.

“I am deeply concerned with reports that further confirmation of use may be outsourced to the United Nations. If Assad sees any equivocation on the red line, it will embolden his regime,” Boehner said.

However, the speaker stopped short of making any specific suggestions about what the U.S. should do. “After two years of brutal conflict, it’s past time for the president to have a robust conversation with the Congress and the American people about how best to bring Assad’s tyranny to an end,” Boehner said.

There seems little doubt that with evidence growing that chemical weapons were used in some fashion, Obama’s credibility is also at stake — and in a way that goes far beyond domestic politics.

Aside from Syria, the president’s best known foreign policy “red line” is his vow that he will not permit Iraq to obtain a nuclear weapon. Any fudging on Syria is likely to stoke fears in Israel that Obama is bluffing on the nuclear issue and to lead some in Tehran to conclude that, when push comes to shove, he’ll prove to be all talk and no action on Iran.

“You’ve got an audience for this now. The Israelis and Iranians are looking at what ‘red lines’ mean,” the former intelligence official said. “Is [there] ever going to have any more certainty that Iran has decided to [make] a nuclear weapon than that Assad used a chemical weapon? This is replete with a lot of implications.”

Speaking about the nuclear issue last month, Vice President Joe Biden sought to reassure Israelis and American Jews that Obama’s words could be taken to the bank.

“Presidents of the United States cannot and do not bluff, and President Barack Obama is not bluffing,” Biden said emphatically.

The official who briefed reporters on Syria Thursday made clear that the White House understands that the president’s credibility is on the line.

“I think nobody should have any mistake about what our red line is. It is when we firmly establish that there has been chemical weapons use within Syria, that is not acceptable to the United States, nor is the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist organizations,” said the White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “And the people in Syria and the Assad regime should know that the president means what he says when he set that red line.”

The skepticism the Iraq War spurred about intelligence isn’t just a concern for the White House, but an impediment to getting international support for whatever response Obama decides to take.

”Particularly after the Iraq experience, the international community is going to expect a high degree of confidence,” Berger said.

The renewed debate about Syria’s use of chemical weapons came as Obama was getting a very direct reminder of his predecessor’s legacy as the two men and the other living presidents gathered in Texas for the opening of the George W. Bush library.

Analysts close to the White House have suggested that the president is fearful that increased U.S. engagement in Syria, even the direct provision of weapons by the U.S., will lead inexorably to calls for direct military intervention.

“There are second- and third-order consequences to that sort of decision that are enormous,” former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said on MSNBC last month. “We’re at the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq war. I think we need to remember … that 150,000 troops couldn’t stop a sectarian war.”

“Going in there [to Syria], there’s where the ghosts come in,” said former CIA officer Bob Baer. “It will be like walking into a giant lawn mower, into a giant lawn mower blade. “This is worse than Iraq in terms of putting troops inside Syria’s borders. It’s more chaotic and more likely you will lose a lot of troops.”

While the Bush Administration sought to downplay disagreements from intelligence agencies about the evidence of a nuclear program in Iraq, the Obama Administration went out of its way Thursday to stress the qualifiers accompanying the Syria chemical weapons assessment.

“Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria,” White House legislative liaison Miguel Rodriguez wrote in a letter to senators. The letter also indicated the evidence came from human “physiological” samples and that the chain of custody of either the samples or the individuals in question was not clear.

Reports from Britain indicated that two rebel fighters were contaminated with the nerve gas sarin, but some experts said it was possible the opposition fighters were exposed accidentally by fighting that may have damaged a building where such weapons were stored.

”I think the evidence right now [of deliberate use] is pretty shaky,” said Lewis, the arms control specialist.

As the administration devises a response, it will also have to consider the possibility that aggressive U.S. action could cause or appear to cause the very thing the U.S. has said it wanted to prevent: a decision by the regime to unleash its stockpiles of chemical weapons.

“I’m actually worried that if Assad thinks he’s losing that he will gas large numbers of civilians,” Lewis said.