Credibility Counts, No Matter What Obama's Minions Say

According to this chorus, which stretches from the White House to sympathetic journalists and policy analysts, an overextended America has long been hamstrung by its obsession with so-called credibility. From Vietnam to Iraq to Crimea and Syria, denizens of the Washington "Blob," to use deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes's derisive phrase for the capital's bipartisan foreign policy elite, have exaggerated threats to our security and promiscuously asserted an American stake in conflicts that have little bearing on our interests. "Credibility," defined simply as the alignment of word and deed, is the term invoked by critics of the administration's Syria policy who allege that the president lost a great deal of this precious commodity by promising to do something and then breaking his word. In most areas of human activity, credibility is a prized attribute; in diplomacy, it wins friends and cows enemies. But to partisans of the outgoing administration, already engaged in a process of historical revisionism aimed at obscuring the true record of this disastrous presidency, credibility is nothing but a pretext for bellicosity, one that burdens America with unnecessary commitments and perennially leads us down the path of doing, in the president's colorful words, "stupid shit."