By Edward Lynn, President of The Beer Party

On the eve of the 12th Anniversary of 9/11, are we witnessing a masterful game of international “good cop, bad cop” on the chess board, with the two cold war super-power nations playing the leading roles? Are we seeing our President make bold moves that might appear to be towards yet another middle eastern civil-war, but which are really away from such future involvements? And are we, at the same time, seeing our President brilliantly eliminate one of the greatest WMD threats to our security in the world? Are we even seeing our current President deliberately diluting the power of his own office, in order to prevent the sort of abuses of that power engaged in by our last President – before we end up with our next one?

I think we just might be. Let me illustrate why….

Imagine you were the President of the United States, and the one nation, Syria, a middle eastern nation no less, with the world’s largest stockpile of chemical weapons – which are, ounce for ounce, thousands of times more deadly than conventional arms – was engaged in a civil war, and using their chemical weapons on their own people? And what if you knew the man in charge of that country was a psychopathic tyrant with close ties to terrorists, who wouldn’t hesitate to give those chemical weapons of mass destruction to those terrorists to use against us, here at home, and our allies and outposts abroud, in retaliation for any attack on him?

And what if you were the President who’d had to clean up the war messes of the last administration, which had lied America into a war we didn’t need to be in, and botched the war we should been in, leaving both mess for you to clean up? And what if the America you presided over were a war weary nation that every poll said would never approve of going to war again so soon? And what if your base were liberals who would not support getting involved in yet another war without a crystal clear and inarguably present danger? And what if you’re the first black President, and the opposition party has been engaging in plenty of “wink and nod” racist rhetoric during your tenure, and controls the House of Representatives. And what if, because of their prejudices, the “loyal opposition” has been unprecendentedly obstructionist toward anything you try to do, since gaining control that control of the House?

In 2007, New York Times columnist David Brooks asked Barack Obama if he had ever read the Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. "I love him," the then-senator replied. "He's one of my favorite philosophers."

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When it comes to Syria, President Obama seems to be channeling Reinhold Niebuhr as he presses for U.S. military action to punish the atrocity of a nation gassing its own citizens. Syrian violence must be met with forceful coercion from moral nations, and America must use its military power toward the ethical goal of eliminating chemical weapons. This echoes Niebuhr's assertion, "As long as the world of man remains a place where nature and God, the real and the ideal, meet, human progress will depend upon the judicious use of the forces of nature in the service of the ideal." Thus, violence is justified to end violence. If President Obama had fully followed Reinhold Niebuhr, the strike would have surely commenced by now. However, something odd happened on the way to retaliation -- a pause. To talk, argue, reflect, and vote? Our politics-obsessed culture depicts this as waffling or weakness or presidential second thoughts based on bad polling numbers.

But what if something else is at work? There was another Niebuhr, Reinhold's younger brother H. Richard, who taught at Yale. In 1932, the year Moral Man was published, the two brothers held a debate in the pages of the Christian Century on an important political question of the day -- whether or not the United States should intervene on behalf of China in light of atrocities inflicted on them by a Japanese invasion.

The elder Niebuhr argued to "dissuade Japan from her military venture" by whatever means necessary. Contra his brother, H. Richard Niebuhr suggested that doing nothing was the way toward peace. H. Richard outlined a theology of moral "inactivity." Against the rush of events, an ethical nation must reflect upon the causes of the problem, form potential courses of action, and discern self-interest in the conflict -- all within a framework of God's intentions in history. This constructive inactivity is the moral opposite of immediate reaction, a response akin to what H. Richard compared to an angry parent who corrects bad behavior with a "verbal, physical, or economic spanking." Unlike his brother, H. Richard thought that violence could not be reconciled with any sort of meaningful faith or "radical trust" in God.