Barack Obama marshals his forces for war of non-intervention in Syria When national leaders take their countries into war, even the wisest presidents, prime minister and generals throughout history have forgotten to ask themselves beforehand: when and how does this end? President Barack Obama and his allies are not making the same mistake with Syria. On current planning, America's war in Syria starts some time in the next few days, depending on what happens at the UN, and then finishes 48 to 72 hours or so later. All official US statements, be they on the record or in behind-the-scenes briefings, are peppered with words such as "limited," "surgical," and "intermediate," to emphasise how any action will be quarantined to a few days. The US-led attack on Syria, in other words, is not about intervening in the civil conflict. It is about not intervening. The lead-up to the decision by the US and its allies to bomb Syria in response to alleged use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad's forces has inevitably been tangled with analogies to the post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria is easily distinguishable from Iraq in many respects. The coalition includes the French and has the support of many Arab states; and the Obama administration has specifically said any military attack is not about regime change. But the ghosts of Iraq still hover over every decision to go to war, no matter how limited and quarantined the US may want such action to be. Congress is so wary of having its fingerprints on the issue that its leaders are happy not to have to vote. In the House, the Republican and Democratic leaders asked initially only for consultation, although John Boehner, the Speaker, toughened his demand on Wednesday for the president to explain any attack on Syria. Perennial hawks such as John McCain in the Senate have long pressed for a more interventionist US role in Syria. "If this isn't aimed at regime change, then what is it aimed at?" he said with visible frustration on Wednesday. But Mr McCain and his supporters who are scattered across the political spectrum, from the neocons to the so-called "Humvee liberals" who barracked for the Iraq invasion, remain outside mainstream public opinion. More to the point, the White House has no intention of using the bully pulpit, as George W Bush did, to shift public opinion in favour of a more sustained campaign. Mr Obama has never tried to sell the American people on a deeper military role in Syria because he decided long ago that the US national interest would not be served by one. The Iraq experience is crucial, too, in buttressing the key justification for a short bombing campaign: what John Kerry, the secretary of state, called the "undeniable" evidence that Mr Assad ordered the use of chemical weapons itself on its own people. The US is readying the release of its evidence of the Assad's regime's complicity, probably on Thursday, in what Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called "the US intelligence community's most important single document in a decade." Memories of Colin Powell's now discredited presentation to the UN before the Iraq invasion on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction remain raw in the US system, no more so than in the intelligence community. As Mr Cordesman says, the US has lost its credibility to assert that Mr Assad ordered the use of the chemical weapons and it will be difficult to regain it with a document that is necessarily constrained about revealing its sources. "The US government may trust the US government," he says. That is not a trust the world shares, and recent polls indicate that it may not be a trust American people share as well. And so it is that the west prepares another incursion into an unstable Middle East, not with any swagger but with an eagle-eye on budgets and public opinion at home, and an ingrained humility about what it can achieve with its military abroad. In such an environment, it may be little wonder that Mr Assad does not feel terribly scared. The US and its allies may be in and out in days. But the war for the Syrian people, seemingly, goes on for ever