BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

It is striking, the degree to which President Barack Obama can do the right thing so badly.

Look at the last ten days of Syrian decision-making. He made a decision to attack Syria, unilaterally, for using chemical weapons on its own people, without the public concurrence of the United Nations or many of our allies, both Middle Eastern and European, and without consulting Congress. He made the decision before United Nations’ weapons inspectors had even started their inspection of the site of the bombings in Damascus.

In the intervening week, however, the President has consulted with our allies. He delayed a military strike until after Congress debates and goes on record for or against authorizing military intervention for him, which now won’t occur until after the UN inspectors have had time to submit their findings. His rationale, as explained in the Rose Garden August 31, is that unilateral military action is a power he does possess as Commander-in-Chief, but as President, he has the obligation to ensure that the representatives of the people have their say.

I respect the President for having the courage to engage Syria. The use of chemical weapons, as he said a year ago, is a “red line” offense that violates almost 100 years of international agreements, which date back to the Geneva convention after chemical weapons were introduced in World War I. The civilized world again outlawed their production, stockpiling and use in a 1996 agreement signed by 98 percent of world’s population; Syria, of course, not among them. The use of chemical weapons is barbaric, inhumane, and inexcusable, even from a strategic military perspective.

At some point the human race just has to draw that red line for certain forms of behavior that are clearly inhumane. For nearly a century, the human race has been pretty definitive about where chemical and biological weapons fit into the definition of inhumane. Prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, and punishing those who do, is one of those protocols that separate us from the animal kingdom. Chemical and biological weapons are at that intersection where laws and values converge, where green, yellow, and red lights should govern our behavior.

We tolerate degrees of drinking, for example, but we don’t tolerate drunk driving. We tolerate pot, but we don’t tolerate heroin addiction. We tolerate degrees of violence, but we don’t tolerate the mass shooting of innocent people. We tolerate warfare, but not torture or chemicals.

That is why it is so frustrating that the United Nations is once again demonstrating itself to be an impotent, irrelevant and shameful world body, failing to reflect basic human values and the mandate of the vast majority of global society. It is not enough for the UN to investigate the use of chemical weapons, it must do something about them. That is why it was created.

Vladimir Putin has hijacked the entire organization and left the world community red faced—no pun intended–actually sanctioning the use of chemical weapons by one nation on its own people. It’s just inexcusable and the industrialized democracies of the world, those who are the financial underpinning of the United Nations, should not let Putin’s stranglehold go unchallenged.

South of the New York headquarters of the UN, the Congress, mirroring our own society, will argue and debate U.S. intervention in a foreign civil war, the effectiveness of troopless military strikes, the role and responsibility of the UN, and probably NATO, the European Union and the Arab League. But I will bet there will be no debate over the moral, legal, political, ethical, and humane use of chemical and biological weapons.

The debate in Congress will no doubt be spirited, but hopefully mature. Unlike, what we are hearing in the media, however, it is doubtful that the debate will be driven by partisanship and elective politics. Ideological and philosophical divides that strike at the heart of America’s militarism and internationalism will drive the debate. Much will depend on the language of the resolution under consideration, a very critical element that helped make the difference in previous congressional debates of presidential military powers, such as those that authorized the Bush interventions in Kuwait and Iraq.

Regardless of the outcome, I believe the President’s instincts and his motivation are right. He has seen a crisis, verified its gravity and sought to meet it head on. Once again, though, his clumsy, start-again-stop-again, start-again, jump-the-gun, approach has left us with much less hair.

It is easy to conclude that the President, as has been the case for the past six years, is poorly served by staff and advisors who are incredibly adept at campaign-style politics but utterly incompetent at governing. But that is not the only vacuum of competency.

The Obama administration has consistently failed to make clean connections between life-sized problems and their solutions. There seems to be a persistent disconnect between theory and practice, perception and reality, and politics and governing. This has been the experience throughout his Presidency, dealing with Congress, which has been unfairly blamed for the dysfunction between the two, and dealing with the American people, whose expectations have been driven to breathtaking new heights only to have them slapped down by ineptness and inaction.

On Syria, the President is exercising leadership, putting American values and international principles into practice.  He may not be sure-footed, but he is surely right.