When people were being brutalized in Bosnia in the 1990s, Mr. Obama told a national television audience, it took the international community more than a year to intervene with air power to protect civilians. It took us 31 days. Yet while the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has brutalized its citizens for more than a year, Mr. Obama now shows no signs of intervening with force, an option his White House sees leading only to 'greater chaos, greater carnage,' as Jay Carney, the press secretary, put it this week. If the president considered Libya a model of humanitarian intervention, Syria increasingly looks like Mr. Obama s Bosnia.

President Obama called on Thursday for the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to leave office, and issued a new executive order freezing all Syrian assets within American jurisdiction and barring American citizens from any business dealings with the government.