What to say?
Obama just
talks babbles over key questions from Stephanopoulos, and the latter routinely fails to follow-up those questions and press the issues. U.S. policy under this administration has shifted from the two-year-long demand the Assad must step aside ---
ASSAD MUST GO! --- to the position of reaching a Russian-brokered international accord allowing U.N. inspectors into Syria on a wish and a prayer? What could go wrong? Seriously.
The best thing for Obama is that the Syria crisis may now be finally coming to a much-needed conclusion, which allows foreign policy to move out of the constant 24-hour news cycle.
Idiot leftists are lamely trying to spin this interview as some kinda game-changer. See, for example, the partisan hacks at PoliticusUSA, "
Obama Obliterates The Republican Myth That Putin Saved Him on Syria." (The blog's down at the moment, although that headline at Memeoandum is plenty
lulz right there.)
Meanwhile, Margaret Wente nails the headline at Toronto's
Globe and Mail (and you can click through and read this one), "
Barack Obama, the 98-pound weakling":
So, let me get this straight. Some red lines cannot be crossed, and gassing Syrian children is one of them. That’s what Barack Obama told us Tuesday evening. “The images from this massacre are sickening,” he said. “Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath. A father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk.”
The moral imperative is clear, he argued. We cannot let dictators get away with this. On the other hand, the United States can’t be expected to solve all the world’s problems, either. Therefore, the way ahead is to outsource U.S. foreign policy on Syria to … Vladimir Putin!
So much for the credibility of the world’s only superpower. Mr. Obama’s staff have been tweeting that this delaying tactic is an incredible display of smart diplomacy. But to most of us, it just makes him look gullible. The President has allowed himself to be hog-tied and hornswoggled by Lilliputians. He was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past, when a blundering giant threw its weight around and only wound up showing the world how incompetent it is. But if there’s one thing worse than being a blundering giant, it’s being a 98-pound weakling.
On Thursday, Mr. Putin kicked more sand in his face. On the op-ed page of The New York Times no less, he lectured Mr. Obama on diplomacy and peace. “From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future,” he said with a straight face. “We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law.”
This from the guy who has been arming Bashar al-Assad to the teeth and blocking the United Nations from doing anything about it. Mr. al-Assad has been using Russian weapons to slaughter his own people.
I guess it’s always possible that the Syrian dictator (memorably likened to a “human toothbrush” by Christopher Hitchens) will immediately surrender his stockpiles of chemical weapons (which he has claimed he doesn’t have), welcome UN weapons inspectors with open arms and give armed protection to the squads of experts who will be necessary to decommission and destroy his various caches of nerve gas, who will somehow do their jobs in the midst of a the bloody civil war that has already destroyed half the country. Or maybe the UN can send in peacekeepers to put it under international control. Or maybe the Easter Bunny will intervene.
More likely is that Mr. al-Assad will use the newly opened diplomatic track to obfuscate, delay, prevaricate and continue killing people, while tying up the process in endless procedural knots. He has now promised to sign the UN Chemical Weapons Treaty – just not quite yet, and only if the U.S. stops arming the rebels, and only if Israel ratifies it first.
Ouch.
Continue reading after you remove your forehead from the furniture on which it just came crashing down.
And then check Janet Daly, at Telegraph UK, "
Poker-face Putin holds all the cards":
At one point last week in the charade known as “the Syria peace negotiations”, John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, announced solemnly, “This is not a game”. Well, he was wrong there. This certainly is a game: the trouble is that Barack Obama is trying to pretend that it’s chess, while Vladimir Putin plays hard-faced poker. The absurd story that the White House has been concocting off the top of its head – in which the stage we have reached was actually the American goal all along – is desperate. We can expect the talks between the US and Russia to be punctuated by repeated announcements of “agreement” like the one we had yesterday, to make this seem credible.
So this was always the plan, plotted three moves ahead by the clever American president, who was only pretending to be indecisive, quixotic and out of his depth. By sort-of threatening military intervention and then appearing to back down at the last minute, the US was not dithering or tripping over its own feet on the world stage. Oh no. It was creating the necessary conditions for Bashar al-Assad and his Russian mentors to come to the table and begin the process of submitting themselves to international standards on chemical weapons. Of course, if we pursue the chess analogy, then the first clever move was really Assad’s. By using chemical weapons, he created the necessary conditions by which the US would be forced to engage in these negotiations, which will almost certainly protect his regime from removal by the West, and will guarantee his Russian friends a place on the highest global platform.
Assad the war criminal, presiding over his little tinpot dictatorship, can now present his demands (for no more threats of military intervention, and no help to Syria’s rebels) to the world’s only remaining superpower in return for handing over weapons that are illegal anyway. The man who holds an illicit armoury can use that cache of arms as a bargaining chip to protect his own future. And Putin, the ex-KGB autocrat presiding over a country with a dying population, a failing economy and a defunct military – who was once cast by Obama as beyond the pale because of his unacceptable human-rights record – can bluster and preen as he delivers peace in our time. Yes indeed, it’s all going according to plan.
Well, maybe it is going according to plan, if that plan is to destroy America's power, influence, and credibility in the world. The problem with that hypothesis is that of course the president denies it. He's arguing that his diplomacy is strengthening U.S. interests and standing.
In any case, Ms. Daly continues at
the link.
The Los Angeles Times has the straight news angle, "
Obama defends deal with Russia on Syria, says it could end war."
And still more at
Memeorandum.
