Despite huffing, puffing and chest pounding Obama has thankfully backed off helping al-Qaeda and its allies in Syria. The Russians have made offer that they will help dismantle Syrian WMDs in return for the US backing off strikes. Not only will this mean Assad can’t transfer weapons to Hezbollah, but it will prevent al-Qaeda/al-Nusra from seizing them and using it.
In the end, Obama ended up looking like a clown and his red line over Syria, has effectively crippled his Presidency. Not even his own party was backing his call for war. The public was vehemently against the intervention.
To support the president’s enforcement of his red line in Syria requires suspensions of disbelief. Here are several.
I wish it were not true, but there is scant evidence that the world, led by the U.S., went to war in the past over the use of weapons of mass destruction — whether by Gamel Nasser in Yemen or by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds and the Iranians. Understandably, the current West’s reaction, including Obama’s, to possible Syrian WMD use is calibrated mostly on the dangers of intervention, not the use of WMD per se. Thus Obama is now focusing on Syria in a way he is not, at least overtly, on Iran, the far greater WMD threat, because he believes the former could be handled with two days’ worth of Tomahawks and the latter could not. That would be understandable pragmatism if it were not dressed up in the current humanitarian bluster about red lines and the “international community.”
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No one currently in charge of U.S. foreign policy has any record of foreign-policy success. Those who might have offered wise counsel either are dead, have left the administration, or do not exercise authority — Crocker, Eikenberry, Gates, Holbrooke, Mattis, Petraeus. In contrast, the common theme among Obama, Biden, Hagel, Rice, Kerry, and Power is not brilliance. They cannot agree in public with each other; they contradict their own past statements; they have lost the public’s confidence in their veracity; and they sermonize and pontificate rather than inspire. One day we are bombing and skipping authorization from Congress; the next day, everything is on hold while Congress vacations; the next, its vote may not even matter; the next, the “shot across the bow” is a full-fledged, non-tiny attack; and most recently, everything is on hold again while the Russians — in the middle of a civil war, no less — negotiate with Assad to account for and turn over his WMD. We are certainly not in reliable hands to make one of the most complicated interventions in recent U.S. history.
Obama has been exposed as the jokester many on the Right have known for the last 5-7 years.
Tags: al Nusra Front, Arab Spring, Syrian War
