http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-sdO6pwVHQ#t=207
Why I’ll vote no on Syria strike
By Senator Ted CruzNo decision by an elected official is more serious than whether to send our armed forces into conflict. President Obama was right to seek Congress’s authorization to use military force against Syria. But having carefully considered the president’s substantive arguments, I am compelled to vote against the requested authorization.
I do not make this decision lightly. I want to support our commander in chief. I emphatically condemn Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his people, and all Americans mourn the loss of innocent lives in Syria’s civil war.
The president insists on using a military option, which I oppose for three reasons:
First, Assad’s actions, however deplorable, are not a direct threat to U.S. national security. Many bad actors on the world stage have, tragically, oppressed and killed their citizens, even using chemical weapons to do so. Unilaterally avenging humanitarian disaster, however, is well outside the traditional scope of U.S. military action.
Second, just because Assad is a murderous thug does not mean that the rebels opposing him are necessarily better. As of May, seven of the nine major rebel groups appeared to have significant ties to Islamists, some of whom may have links to al-Qaeda and other terrorists. Their presence and power have only increased, according to media reports. We should never give weapons to people who hate us, and the United States should not support or arm al-Qaeda terrorists.
Third, the potential for escalation is immense. Syria is in the midst of a sectarian civil war, born of centuries-old animosities. We have no clear ally in this Sunni-Shiite conflict, and any “limited” and “proportional” strike could quickly get out of control, imperiling our allies and forcing us into the civil war.
The president and his secretary of state have repeatedly said that Assad’s use of chemical weapons violates an “international norm.” They insist it is critical that we send a “message” to Assad that his behavior is unacceptable. But it is not the job of U.S. troops to police international norms or to send messages. Our men and women in uniform have signed up to defend America.
On the cusp of the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, we should remember that radical Islamic fanatics have declared war on the United States and are determined to destroy our way of life. Although the president has said that the threat from radical Islamism has receded, the reality is that the threat remains.
This threat was active at Fort Hood, where a terrorist attacked our soldiers in 2009. It was active in Libya, where terrorists murdered our ambassador and three other Americans one year ago this week. It was active this spring in Boston, where two terrorists who self-radicalized on the Internet used pressure cookers to kill civilians.
Today, the threat is active in Syria, where jihadists have infiltrated the rebel groups while Hezbollah is supporting Assad, making the presence of chemical weapons in Syria ever more perilous. And it is active in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism that seeks a nuclear bomb to wipe the United States and Israel off the map.
If the president’s proposed military strike against Assad succeeds, al-Qaeda could be strengthened and terrorists could seize control of Syria’s vast cache of chemical weapons.
U.S. military force should always advance our national security. Should we in the future have intelligence that al-Qaeda or Hezbollah is on the verge of acquiring chemical weapons or that Iran is nearing a nuclear breakout, I would support aggressive military action to prevent them from acquiring those weapons because the alternative is unacceptable: allowing Islamic extremists to acquire chemical or nuclear weapons that could be used to slaughter millions in New York or Los Angeles or London or Tel Aviv.
If such occasion arises, the United States must lead to defend its national security interests. No other country is capable of putting together a coalition of like-minded nations and leading the fight against tyranny. And our allies should be encouraged to join us because it is in their own interests.
Yet none of this is occurring now. The administration’s current policy is based on averting immediate risk and accommodating the international community, as is demonstrated by its proposed defense of international norms in Syria. This action fails to protect U.S. long-term national security interests. I cannot in good conscience support it.
The president has rightly sought the will of Congress and, through Congress, the American people; he should heed the verdict.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ted-cruz-why-ill-vote-no-on-syria-strike/2013/09/09/34750cde-1972-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html
Obama’s Farce
He sold his plan for bombing Syria on flawed political assumptions.
By Victor Davis HansonTo 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.”
Obama, I think, is inadvertently doing the terrible arithmetic that the last 1,000 Syrians killed by the Assad regime pose a humanitarian crisis that demands his intervention in a way that the first 99,000 did not — on the theory that WMD represent an existential threat. (In fact, from the trenches of World War I to Hiroshima, WMD have never killed more than contemporary horrific conventional weaponry has.) So far Obama has not made that case. We can only wonder whether the forgotten hundreds of thousands butchered from Rwanda to Darfur — without so much as one Tomahawk or Hellfire launched on their behalf — might have been saved had only their killers begun their devilry with sarin gas.
Obama, as senator and presidential candidate, made the serial argument that U.S. military interventions, barring an “imminent threat” to our national security, are both illegal and immoral unless they have the triad of U.S. congressional support, U.N. approval, and American public support.
In the present circumstances, to make the argument for attacking Syria he must assume that congressional authorization is an eleventh-hour afterthought and not necessarily binding, that the U.N. is mostly hocus-pocus and not worth the bother, and that overwhelming public opposition does not matter.
There are so many contradictions and hypocrisies in such thinking as to render it farcical. I’ll give one, though: In 2002–03 George Bush built public opinion for an intervention, assembled an allied coalition, succeeded with the U.S. Congress, and tried at the U.N. He made the argument that Saddam Hussein’s past use of WMD, his support for terrorism, and his genocide (read all 23 congressional writs) made a good moral and realist case for intervening in a post-9/11 landscape. In response, Barack Obama launched his political career by deriding just such logic, which he is now far less impressively adopting as his own.
Going into a country to help one side and hurt another in a civil war — if that is the latest reason to go to war — assumes the administration has some wisdom about recent Middle East turmoil. Unfortunately, nothing suggests that it does.
Obama shows no interest in anything approximating victory in Afghanistan.
Leaving a residual force in Iraq to preserve a hard-fought victory in achieving a constitutional order was apparently not a good political slogan for 2012.
Libya, to the extent we know what is now going on, is probably worse off than before we led from behind there; There is no administration interest in explaining, much less avenging, our losses in Benghazi. Indeed, the administration has told us less about Benghazi than about Syria.
The common denominator among U.S. actions in Egypt has been the administration’s doing the wrong thing: abruptly junking Mubarak, then backing the Muslim Brotherhood, and then denying that the would-be reformist generals had staged a coup and are a junta.
To support the bombing of Syria, we must assume both that Obama has more knowledge of insurgencies than he did in relation to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and that suddenly he has more stomach for intervening and sorting out good from bad. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely.
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.
When John Kerry lectures us on our moral timidity, we should ask him what sort of regime he thought he was cozying up to prior to 2012. Did he think that Hama was an accident, or that the murder of Lebanese politicians was merely problematic, or that what Israel bombed in 2007 was a fake nuclear facility? When in 2009 he thundered of his mission to Bashar Assad, “Unlike the Bush administration that believed you could simply tell people what to do and walk away and wait for them to do it, we believe you have to engage in a discussion,” did anyone suggest that he was amoral, given the Assad regime’s long history of savagery, including sending killers into Iraq? Please spare us the present bottled piety.
Any war requires a logical objective, a commensurate means of achieving it, and a clear idea of a desired result that is worth the cost. Even if most wars do not play out as envisioned, there is some hope of success when we know why and how we are to fight, and little when we do not. Obama has offered no consistent objective. (Regime change? Destruction of WMD? Punishment for past use of WMD? Establishment of a new global prohibition on WMD? Restoration of presidential credibility? Recovery of America’s reputation in the Middle East? Aid for the insurgents? Hope of forcing Assad to the bargaining table?) We do not seem to have a clear methodology. (Cruise missiles? Bombing? One day? Three weeks? Time is and is not of the essence? When Congress returns and votes? When Vladimir Putin verifies that there are no more WMD in Syria?)
We do not know quite how victory would be defined. (Assad dead? weakened? or gone? Insurgents victorious? Al-Qaedists defeated? A pro-Western consensual government established? WMD blown up or sent on Russian trucks into U.N. hands?) I omit grand strategy, because there is no inkling that anyone has thought how bombing Syria would make the region more compatible with U.S. national interests. Making it up as we go along is a recipe for failure. Killing people to restore personal credibility that was foolishly squandered is a moral travesty.
Obama sold this war on two political assumptions: His liberal base would be willing to embarrass themselves by abandoning anti-war principles in favor of party loyalty to the president and the advancement of a shared progressive agenda; and interventionist Republicans would support another intervention and marginalize those who disagreed. Both assumptions were flawed. Democrats resent the predicament he has put them in, and conservative supporters of bombing Syria are in a minority in the Republican party. In other words, Obama has split both parties, and he will receive support only from their respective minority factions. He has always talked of bipartisanship, and he has achieved it at last by uniting a majority of both Republicans and Democrats against himself.
Obama seems to have become an advocate of just-war theory. As outlined by its proponents from Grotius to Walzer, it assumes that any intervention must save more lives than it will take and will limit rather than widen a conflagration. But in Syria, bombing in and around the custodians of WMD, now embedded among civilians, may kill more than the 1,000 lost to WMD. Furthermore, what reason is there to assume that these soldiers are more dangerous than the al-Qaeda factions that would gain by their death and go on to kill others, many of them Christians, Alawites, and Kurds? Bombing Syria also assumes that missiles will not fly into Israel, terrorists will not go after U.S. assets, and Iran will not react. As of now, none of those just-war expectations is certain.
Obama assumed that the American public would be divided but would not turn overwhelmingly against intervention. That too was naïve. Intervention must be nourished by prior success, or else each subsequent instance becomes a force multiplier of failure in the public eye. Swift, clear-cut success did not follow our initial intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. So, fairly or not, the public expects stalemate or worse in Syria as well.
Obama was elected on the premise that Bush unwisely redirected resources and attention to intervening abroad at a time of budget constraints; so who now will police the police? One can admire Bush for consistency, but Obama suffers the wages of hypocrisy, and this shows in the sinking polls — both his own and the planned intervention’s. Moreover, this is happening not in late 2012, in the wake of Obama’s recent reelection, but in late 2013, after the Benghazi, IRS, AP, and NSA scandals. He badly misjudged public opinion — a serious misstep for a self-described populist on the eve of a complex war.
Obama assumes that because no major power directly challenged us after Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, none will after Syria. Perhaps.
But the proposed Syrian intervention is unique. We either obtained or at least sought U.N. approval in the prior three interventions — of some public-relations value in dissuading mischief by enemy spectators. This time around we snubbed the U.N.
We also had allies in all three interventions; there are none so far who have pledged military assistance. And all those interventions were prior to the recent massive Pentagon cuts.
Syria sits between Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey. It is hard to imagine a more volatile place. Most of the terrorists in Iraq had to travel there; their home base is Syria and Lebanon. Russia had long ago abandoned Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; it still considers Syria a useful and loyal client of good standing that pays its bills. That is why, as long as we preen about imminent bombing, it will off and on pose as a third-party peacemaker, humiliating the United States and boasting to the world community that for another week at least it has saved Obama from his own rash self.
Bush conducted the first two Middle East interventions; an earlier Obama, the third. Now a lame-duck and scandal-ridden Obama is considered no Bush, and weaker even than his earlier incarnation. In other words, this time around it is more likely that our enemies might try something stupid on the premise that they can take advantage of a tentative and Hamlet-like president.
Opponents of Syrian intervention must acknowledge that by standing down now the U.S. might lose credibility. It may perhaps, but the serious question is whether that loss would be lesser or greater than the loss if we bomb the country along the lines that have been so poorly articulated by the administration. In this regard, Obama, I think, is honest in swearing off a wider war, at least in the sense that he would not react to subsequent escalation on the part of our enemies and would ignore any outside players who enter his fray.
If anything, a No vote by Congress is likely to help Obama politically (and seems to be seen as such by his partisan advisers). It would save him from a disastrous intervention, transfer to Congress “blame” for the non-enforcement of his red line, and allow him the opportunity for more soapbox sermons on his own unappreciated integrity and his brave efforts that at least refocused world attention on Syria. Indeed, he already sees a way out by ceding influence and authority to Vladimir Putin, who over the next few days (or weeks) will play third-party adjudicator to ensure that Assad is protected and America flummoxed — which, even Obama is beginning to accept, is preferable to bombing for lost red lines.
By any classical standard for war — U.S. national interest, humanitarian concerns, global stability — the Syrian adventure as currently envisioned and sold is unwise. Most Americans seem to know that. If Obama would swallow his wounded pride, he might learn that too.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/358048/obamas-farce-victor-davis-hanson?splash=
The Bed Obama and Kerry Made
America's way of war: from shock-and-awe to forewarn-and-irritate.
So much for John Kerry's "global test," circa 2004. So much for Barack Obama slamming the Bush administration for dismissing "European reservations about the wisdom and necessity of the Iraq war," circa 2007. So much for belittling foreign leaders who side with the administration as "poodles." So much for the U.N. stamp of legitimacy. So much for the "lie/die" rhyme popular with Democrats when they were accusing George W. Bush of fiddling with the WMD intelligence.Say what you will about the prospect of a U.S. strike on Syria, it has already performed one useful service: exposing the low dishonesty, the partisan opportunism, the intellectual flabbiness, the two-bit histrionics and the dumb hysteria that was the standard Democratic attack on the Bush administration's diplomatic handling of the war in Iraq.
In politics as in life, you lie in the bed you make. The president and his secretary of state are now lying in theirs. So are we.
And then some. All Americans are reduced when Mr. Kerry, attempting to distinguish an attack on Syria with the war in Iraq, described the former as "unbelievably small." Does the secretary propose to stigmatize the use of chemical weapons by bombarding Bashar Assad, evil tyrant, with popcorn? When did the American way of war go from shock-and-awe to forewarn-and-irritate?
Americans are reduced, also, when an off-the-cuff remark by Mr. Kerry becomes the basis of a Russian diplomatic initiative—immediately seized by an Assad regime that knows a sucker's game when it sees one—to hand over Syria's stocks of chemical weapons to international control. So now we're supposed to embark on months of negotiation, mediated by our friends the Russians, to get Assad to relinquish a chemical arsenal he used to deny having, now denies using, and will soon deny secretly maintaining?
One of the favorite Democratic attack lines against the Bush administration was that it was "incompetent." Maybe so, but competence is also a matter of comparison.
So let's compare. The administration will be lucky to win an unbelievably thin congressional majority for its unbelievably small plan of attack. By contrast, the October 2002 authorization for military force in Iraq passed by an easy 77-23 margin in the Senate and a 296-133 margin in the House.
The administration also touts the support of 24 countries—Albania and Honduras are on board!—who have signed a letter condemning Assad's use of chemical weapons "in the strongest terms," though none of them, except maybe France, are contemplating military action. Yet Mr. Bush assembled a coalition of 40 countries who were willing to deploy troops to Iraq—a coalition Mr. Kerry mocked as inadequate and illegitimate when he ran for president in 2004.
Then there's the intel. In London the other day, Mr. Kerry invited the public to examine the administration's evidence of Assad's use of chemical weapons, posted on whitehouse.gov. The "dossier" consists of a 1,455-word document heavy on blanket assertions such as "we assess with high confidence" and "we have a body of information," and "we have identified one hundred videos."
By contrast, the Bush administration made a highly detailed case on Iraqi WMD, including show-and-tells by Colin Powell at the Security Council. It also relied on the testimony of U.N. inspectors like Hans Blix, who reported in January 2003 that "there are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared," that his inspectors had found "indications that the [nerve agent VX] was weaponized," and that Iraq had "circumvented the restrictions" on the import of missile parts.
The case the Bush administration assembled on Iraqi WMD was far stronger than what the Obama administration has offered on Syria. And while I have few doubts that the case against Assad is solid, it shouldn't shock Democrats that the White House's "trust us" approach isn't winning converts. When you've spent years peddling the libel that the Bush administration lied about Iraq, don't be shocked when your goose gets cooked in the same foul sauce.
So what should President Obama say when he addresses the country Tuesday night? He could start by apologizing to President Bush for years of cheap slander. He won't. He could dispense with the talk of "global norms" about chemical weapons and instead talk about the American interest in punishing Assad. He might. He could give Americans a goal worth fighting for: depose Assad, secure the chemical weapons, lead from the front, and let Syrians sort out the rest. Well, let's hope.
In the meantime, Republicans should ponder what their own political posturing on Syria might mean for the future. When a Republican president, faced with a Democratic House, feels compelled to take action against some other rogue regime, will they rue their past insistence on congressional approval?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579065524049187550.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
Russia and Syria double-team Obama in nifty PR peace move
To be sure, the Obama administration's war brinkmanship over a non-existent red line in Syria and an invisible global norm over enforcing a chemical weapons ban is no fun if you're on one of the five U.S. destroyers sailing back and forth in the eastern Mediterranean awaiting cruise missile launch orders.But Monday's flurry of international events about President Obama's threat to attack Syria showed a) how amateurishly ad hoc is Obama's attempt to save face over his idle red line threat from a year ago and b) how cleverly adept and swift Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syria's Bashar Assad are in manipulating news media in the guerrilla combat for world public opinion.
Their skillful, rapid-fire moves rendered almost meaningless Obama's speech on Syria tonight and his Capitol Hill meetings today with both party's caucuses, originally scheduled to sell to skeptical Americans and their elected representatives on the president's request for authorization to attack Syria.
And it all happened on a day that produced new polls showing not only that Americans are opposed to attacking Syria, but that their opposition is growing to involvement in that country's civil war. And that it would be only slightly mitigated should Congress eventually approve action. Even that now seems increasingly unlikely.
Let's see if we can sort this all out: It all began with another gaffe by Secretary of State John Kerry. In a London news conference, the yacht owner was asked if there was anything Assad could do to avoid an American attack over its use of gas on Aug. 21.
Waving his hands, Kerry said: "Turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn't about to do it and it can't be done."
Immediately, Kerry aides said he was speaking rhetorically. But the Russians quickly announced they would push Syria to accept that. Soon after, Syria said yes, it could live with that.
Obama had intended to do a half-dozen late-afternoon network interviews in a tardy public relations campaign to sell Americans on his war plans. But instead the Democrat was forced to play defense, responding to Russia's Syria proposal. He said he would examine the idea, would continue his congressional sales pitch and all this would take time.
Obama also tried to portray the Russia plan as one he'd actually proposed to Putin months ago. Nice try. Even if true, Putin outmaneuvered the American to own the war-avoidance plan. Google "Obama Syria plan" and "Russia Syria plan" for proof.
Did you notice in all this how quickly the focus changed from Obama's desire to punish Assad, make him an example to deter anyone's future use of chemical weapons, and became simply securing his supply of these weapons?
Actually, Kerry was right; "it can't be done" simply. And certainly not quickly. Who would or could securely collect the regime's vast supplies of chemical weapons from all their hiding places in the midst of an ongoing chaotic civil war? And verify the whole deal? It took years to assemble the parts to Gadaffi's nuclear weapons program when he gave it up.
But here's what Russia (and Syria) gained: The chemical weapons issue now moves to negotiations. They will take forever. Any such weapons actually kept from rebel hands helps Russia, which has its own internal Islamist militant problems in Chechnya and elsewhere.
Putin, who loves to stick it to the United States (think Edward Snowden, among others), looks like a regular peace monger reining in those crazy Americans at no cost to himself.
Importantly, the American president is now effectively precluded from attacking while talks are underway. Obama tried to argue late Monday that Syria only caved because of his threats. But they're neutralized now. The Nobel Peace Prize winner would look insane to attack during talks, even as Americans' opposition mounted.
And the Chicagoan's South Side is coincidentally saved by the Russians from the humiliating rejection that loomed in Congress, whose Democrat members never really wanted that vote anyway.
The U.S. leader's top speech writers did have to start all over. But that's why they're paid the top $172,000 White House salary. They'll have Obama read his telepromptered lines tonight about a two-pronged approach--securing the chemical weapons and keeping the pressure on Syria to ensure compliance. He may even quote Ronald Reagan's "Trust, but verify" line.
Try not to laugh though if Obama says anything about events unfolding according to his plan.
Syria presents a constitutional moment
By George S WillIn London exile in 1940, Charles de Gaulle decided, “It was up to me to take responsibility for France” (“c’etait a moi d’assumer la France ”). No U.S. president should assume he is, as de Gaulle almost mystically did, the nation, or is solely responsible for it. Remember this Tuesday when Barack Obama defends his choice to attack Syria.
U.S. power and security are somewhat dependent on a president’s stature, which should not be diminished unnecessarily. Neither, however, should America’s well-being be equated with a president’s policy preferences or political health. The real but limited importance of presidential prestige and the real but limited diminution of it that would result from blocking Obama’s attack both matter. But so do the manifest and manifold weaknesses of his argument.
George Orwell, who said insincerity is the enemy of clear language, would understand why our government talks of “quantitative easing” rather than printing money and uses “enhanced interrogation” and “extraordinary rendition” rather than more concrete denotations. The debate about Syria has featured a peculiar phrase, “the vetted opposition.”
Used by those advocating intervention, it implies that most anti-Assad fighters have been investigated enough to dispel doubts about them as appropriate beneficiaries of U.S. actions. But John McCain’s breezy assurance (“I have met them”) is insufficient. Skepticism is warranted, given the prodigies of confusion in administration statements, including historical amnesia.
Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons is only his most recent, and he is not the first to have used such weapons in war since the 1925 Geneva Protocol proscribing them. But because attacking Syria is said to be necessary as reinforcement of the 1925 “norm,” it matters that the norm has been violated before. In the 1960s, Egypt used chemical weapons against Yemen. Saddam Hussein used them not only against disobedient Iraqis but in the 1980-88 war with Iran. A March 23, 1984, CIA report said: “Iraq has begun using nerve agents . . . [which] could have a significant impact on Iran’s human wave tactics, forcing Iran to give up that strategy.” A new article by Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid in Foreign Policy says that in 1988:
“The United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.”
U.S. officials denied acquiescing in such attacks because Iraq never announced them. But Harris and Aid quote retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, a military attache in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, saying, “The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew.”
The argument for attacking Syria to strengthen a “norm” may be weaker than the argument for Congress halting the attack to strengthen constitutional balance. The outcome of the vote on attacking Syria may be less important than the fact of the vote. Through the physics of our Madisonian politics — one institution’s action producing another’s reaction — the nation has reached a constitutional moment.
Every policy choice occurs in a context conditioned by other choices. Barack Obama’s Syrian choice comes after multiple executive excesses that have provoked Congress to react against its marginalization, a product of its supine passivity regarding Obama’s unilateral lawmaking.
It is unfortunate that a foreign policy decision has catalyzed congressional resistance to presidential aggrandizement on many fronts. But no congressional vote about Syria can damage the presidency as much as Obama has done by overreaching, and by sophistical rhetoric that refutes his appeals for unconditional trust. The shriveling of his presidency probably became irreversible when laughter greeted his sophomoric claim that not he but “the world” drew a red line regarding chemical weapons.
After incessant calls for “bipartisanship” to supplant “obstructionism,” there has emerged a broad bipartisan coalition to obstruct his Syrian policy. His policy is doomed without many Democratic senators swallowing their pride, disregarding past convictions and becoming presidential poodles. Such canine obedience will express obedience to progressivism’s unchanging essence — exaltation of executive discretion and disparagement of the separation of powers. That is, implacable impatience with Madison’s constitutional architecture.
Obama hardly has de Gaulle’s kind of mystical identification of himself with his nation, or de Gaulle’s desperate reason for such a conflation. However, Obama’s recent references to “my military” have a French antecedent in Louis XIV’s l’etat c’est moi. This president has inadvertently made the case for strengthening the presidency by pruning the office’s pretensions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-syria-presents-a-constitutional-moment/2013/09/09/e3c04d58-1971-11e3-82ef-a059e54c49d0_story.html
In Syria, Putin's the Player and Obama's the Playee
President
Barack Obama has become a comic figure on the world stage, a
laughingstock unable to keep his story straight, while his principal
rival seizes the initiative in Syria. So desperate is Obama for a
face-saving retreat from his ultimatum on Syrian chemical weapons that
he will concede the really important issues to Russia, Syria and Iran.
And being Obama, he will portray his retreat as a great diplomatic
victory, and his media claque will sell the story to the low information
voting public.
Vladimir Putin saw his opening when SecState Kerry casually offered a response to a reporter's question that the United States would call off its threat to attack Syria if that country turned over its chemical weapons. The actual professional diplomats at the State Department, horrified, claimed that this policy shift was a "rhetorical, hypothetical" offer, but it was too late. Putin's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia would push its Syrian ally to turn over all its chemical weapons to an international body.
With this move, Putin has got Obama exactly where he wants him. Obama is anxious to avoid the humiliation of a likely congressional repudiation of his threat to launch missiles, even an "unbelievably small" attack, in Kerry's asinine formulation yesterday. So Obama is ready to in effect ratify Assad's hold on power by agreeing to play nice with him if only he turns over those WMD's.
Never mind that actually securing all those weapons would be a massive task in even a peaceful country; in civil war-torn Syria, it is almost impossible. Assad and Putin can nonetheless defang Obama by slow-walking the process. In the meantime, Russia becomes the principal guarantor of peace in the Middle East and the mullahs of Iran continue their nuclear program aimed at changing the Middle East game completely. In substantive terms, this is an enormous victory for Putin and a defeat for Obama.
None of these substantive issues matter to Obama, so long as he will be able to claim credit for keeping the peace and removing the threat of Syrian WMDs. In his interview yesterday with Bret Baier, he claimed to have been working on this proposal for over a year:
In his speech to the nation tonight, we can expect Obama to claim that Putin's initiative is really the product of his high level diplomacy, and we can expect his supporters in the media and Congress to overlook the State Department's immediate repudiation of Kerry's offhand policy position. America's power and influence are nose-diving under Obama, but for domestic political consumption, he will claim a triumph. The real players on the world stage know differently, and the ultimate cost of this weakness is unknowable. But for the moment, Obama is spared a serious humiliation, and to his allies, this is quite enough.
Vladimir Putin saw his opening when SecState Kerry casually offered a response to a reporter's question that the United States would call off its threat to attack Syria if that country turned over its chemical weapons. The actual professional diplomats at the State Department, horrified, claimed that this policy shift was a "rhetorical, hypothetical" offer, but it was too late. Putin's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia would push its Syrian ally to turn over all its chemical weapons to an international body.
With this move, Putin has got Obama exactly where he wants him. Obama is anxious to avoid the humiliation of a likely congressional repudiation of his threat to launch missiles, even an "unbelievably small" attack, in Kerry's asinine formulation yesterday. So Obama is ready to in effect ratify Assad's hold on power by agreeing to play nice with him if only he turns over those WMD's.
Never mind that actually securing all those weapons would be a massive task in even a peaceful country; in civil war-torn Syria, it is almost impossible. Assad and Putin can nonetheless defang Obama by slow-walking the process. In the meantime, Russia becomes the principal guarantor of peace in the Middle East and the mullahs of Iran continue their nuclear program aimed at changing the Middle East game completely. In substantive terms, this is an enormous victory for Putin and a defeat for Obama.
None of these substantive issues matter to Obama, so long as he will be able to claim credit for keeping the peace and removing the threat of Syrian WMDs. In his interview yesterday with Bret Baier, he claimed to have been working on this proposal for over a year:
Uh, I did discuss this with President Putin. Uh, this is something that is not new. I've been discussing this with, uh, President Putin for some time time now. The last time we were at a G-20 meeting in Los Cabos last year. Uh, I suggested the need for the United States and Russia to work together to deal with this particular problem.
It doesn't solve the underlying Syrian conflict, but if we can solve this chemical weapons issue, which is a threat to us, uh, and the world, then it does potentially lay the groundwork for further discussions around how you can bring about a political settlement inside of Syria that would -- would provide relief to, uh, people who, right now, are being displaced or killed on almost a -- a continuing basis.
In his speech to the nation tonight, we can expect Obama to claim that Putin's initiative is really the product of his high level diplomacy, and we can expect his supporters in the media and Congress to overlook the State Department's immediate repudiation of Kerry's offhand policy position. America's power and influence are nose-diving under Obama, but for domestic political consumption, he will claim a triumph. The real players on the world stage know differently, and the ultimate cost of this weakness is unknowable. But for the moment, Obama is spared a serious humiliation, and to his allies, this is quite enough.
Glenn Beck: ‘This Is the Week That America Lost Its Superpower Status’
“Write it down in your calendars,
because this is the week that America lost its superpower status,” Glenn
Beck said on his weekday radio program Tuesday.
Beck was speaking about the
international response to the conflict in Syria, and asserted that it
has been Russia, not the United States, that has emerged looking like a
competent leader.
This is particularly the case after the country offered to take control of Syria’s chemical weapons, thereby potentially averting an international conflict, Beck said.
“When I saw the story that Putin came
out and said, ‘I just was wrestling a bear here about 10 minutes ago…and
I called up Assad and I said, ‘Hey! You’re gonna give me your chemical
weapons.’ And he said, ‘Okay, dude.’ After [Putin] made that statement
and then the president said, ‘Okay, uh, we could do that…’ I thought
to myself…we’re done as a superpower,” Beck said. “He has just put the
final nail in the coffin.”
Beck reminded his audience of Obama’s “hot mic” comment to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, that he would have more “flexibility” after the election, and Medvedev’s response that he would “transmit this message to Vladimir.”
“Maybe this is one of those things that
he was going to take care of, somehow or another elevate Vladimir Putin
and Russia as the lone superpower in the world,” Beck speculated.
“Because I don’t know if you noticed, but the chairs just switched at
the table. Vladimir Putin and Russia is the leading superpower in the world.”
Beck’s co-host Stu Burguiere noted that
“they dictate the terms,” “they create the peace,” and do everything
else that “we’re supposed to be doing.”
Later in the show, when Beck said he
was getting some push-back from listeners for his assertion, Beck’s
co-host Pat Gray maintained: “Putin has made this president, our
president, and the secretary of state look like absolute pathetic
kindergarteners.”
“Morons,” Beck added. “I mean, [Putin] guy was the head of the KGB. While our president was with the ‘Choom Gang,’ that guy was learning how to kill people with his little finger…he doesn’t mess around.”
“[Putin] knows what he’s doing,” Gray agreed. “These idiots in Washington don’t have any clue as to what they’re doing.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/10/glenn-beck-this-is-the-week-that-america-lost-its-superpower-status/
PK'S NOTE: You have no idea how much I hate hearing the sound of Obama's voice but I may have to watch the stupid thing tonight to see how it spins now.
How…unexpected. (Not.) John Kerry said it couldn’t be done. Russia is making sure that it won’t, even if it could be.
Russia is not keen at this stage for a binding U.N. Security Council resolution that would provide a framework to control Syria’s chemical weapons’ stocks, France’s foreign minister said after talks with his Russian counterpart on Tuesday.
“As I understood, the Russians at this stage were not necessarily enthusiastic, and I’m using euphemism, to put all that into the framework of a U.N. binding resolution,” Laurent Fabius told French lawmakers after a telephone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.Obama is being played. The Russian deal forced him to change course and re-write tonight’s speech at the last minute. Now he has to re-write it again, or pretend that the Russians didn’t just drop a flaming bag of something on the White House doorstep. It will be grimly amusing to see what Obama tells the American people about all this now. The words “fiasco” and “clusterf*ck” have been said by others today. He won’t use either word, but that doesn’t mean both don’t apply.
Harry Reid pretended that the Russia deal drove him to halt a vote on force in the Senate. The reality is that Democrat votes for force were “dropping like flies,” and the prospect of passage in the House was always grim. Obama lost the Congressional Black Caucus today. Sen. Mitch McConnell came out against bombing today, breaking with the House GOP leaders who had supported it, and probably killing off any chance that the Senate would help Obama out by at least giving him a split vote in Congress. The likelihood now is that he gets rejected by both houses with actual “No” votes or implicitly if neither brings the authorization to a vote, and then has to decide if he wants to strike Syria anyway. Does Barry feel lucky?
So Obama is being played by Putin. The question is, does he know or even care that he’s being played? He seemed happy enough to grab Putin’s hand and get out of his jam. Now what’s he going to do? Putin is saying that there will be no quick fix, and that he intends to keep on using the UN to mess around with Obama, promise him a prize, then take it away, over and over again. Playing the part of Lucy, Vlad Putin. Playing the part of Charlie Brown trying to kick a football, Barack Obama. For a while to come.
Russia is also now taking away Obama’s fig leaf that the threat of force is driving this phony weapons deal, by taking the threat of force entirely off the table. Obama is playing cards with Reggie Love, Putin is playing 3D chess like a boss.
Obama and his lieutenants keep saying that if we don’t strike Syria, rogue states will be emboldened. That’s dubious, since Iraq’s two-time use of chemical weapons didn’t send the North Koreans south, but it’s obvious that one massive state is being emboldened by Obama’s Hamlet act: Russia. Putin is using Syria to make Obama a laughingstock and America, irrelevant, in a stroke.
I hate to keep tying the same thing over and over, but this won’t end well.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/09/10/russia-backing-away-from-fake-syria-weapons-deal/
Krauthammer: Russia playing chess with rank amateurs
In commenting on what many are calling a gaffe by Secretary of State John Kerry that may have played into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer said “Russia is playing chess with a set of rank amateurs.”http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/09/10/krauthammer-russia-playing-chess-with-rank-amateurs-83067
Making Sense of Syria
By Peggy NoonanThis is what I think we’re seeing:
The president has backed away from a military strike in Syria. But he can’t acknowledge this or act as if it is true. He is acting and talking as if he’s coolly, analytically, even warily contemplating the Russian proposal and the Syrian response. The proposal, he must know, is absurd. Bashar Assad isn’t going to give up all his hidden weapons in wartime, in the middle of a conflict so bitter and severe that his forces this morning reportedly bombed parts of Damascus, the city in which he lives. In such conditions his weapons could not be fully accounted for, packed up, transported or relinquished, even if he wanted to. But it will take time—weeks, months—for the absurdity to become obvious. And it is time the president wants. Because with time, with a series of statements, negotiations, ultimatums, promises and proposals, the Syria crisis can pass. It can dissipate into the air, like gas.
The president will keep the possibility of force on the table, but really he’s lunging for a lifeline he was lucky to be thrown.
Why is he backing off? Because he knows he doesn’t have the American people and isn’t going to get them. The polls, embarrassingly, show the more people hear the less they support it. The president’s problem with his own base was probably startling to him, and sobering. He knows he was going to lose Congress, not only the House but very possibly—likely, I’d say—the Senate. The momentum was all against him. And he never solved—it was not solvable—his own Goldilocks problem: A strike too small is an embarrassment, a strike too big could topple the Assad regime and leave Obama responsible for a complete and cutthroat civil war involving terrorists, foreign operatives, nihilists, jihadists, underemployed young men, and some really nice, smart people. Obama didn’t want to own that, or the fires that could engulf the region once Syria went up.
His plan was never good. The choices were never good. In any case he was going to lose either in terms of domestic prestige, the foreign result or both. Likely both.
He got himself into it and now Vladimir Putin, who opposes U.S. policy in Syria and repeatedly opposed a strike, is getting him out. This would be coldly satisfying for Putin and no doubt personally galling for Obama—another reason he can’t look as if he’s lunging.
A serious foreign-policy intellectual said recently that Putin’s problem is that he’s a Russian leader in search of a Nixon, a U.S. president he can really negotiate with, a stone player who can talk grand strategy and the needs of his nation, someone with whom he can thrash it through and work it out. Instead he has Obama, a self-besotted charismatic who can’t tell the difference between showbiz and strategy, and who enjoys unburdening himself of moral insights to his peers.
But Putin has no reason to want a Syrian conflagration. He is perhaps amused to have a stray comment by John Kerry be the basis for a resolution of the crisis. The hidden rebuke: It means that when Putin met with Obama at the G-20 last week Obama, due to his lack of competence, got nothing. But a stray comment by the Secretary of State? Sure, why not rub Obama’s face in it.
* * *
All this, if it is roughly correct, is going to make the president’s
speech tonight quite remarkable. It will be a White House address in
which a president argues for an endeavor he is abandoning. It will be a
president appealing for public support for an action he intends not to
take.We’ve never had a presidential speech like that!
So what will he say? Some guesses.
He will not really be trying to “convince the public.” He will be trying to move the needle a little, which will comfort those who want to say he retains a matchless ability to move the masses. It will make him feel better. And it will send the world the message: Hey, this isn’t a complete disaster. The U.S. president still has some juice, and that juice can still allow him to surprise you, so watch it.
He will attempt to be morally compelling and rhetorically memorable. He will probably, like Susan Rice yesterday, attempt to paint a graphic portrait of what chemical weapons do—the children in their shrouds, the suffering parents, what such deaths look like and are. This is not meaningless: the world must be reminded what weapons of mass destruction are, and what the indifference of the world foretells.
He will claim the moral high ground. He will temporarily reserve the use of force and welcome recent diplomatic efforts. He will suggest it was his threat of force that forced a possible diplomatic solution. His people will be all over the airwaves saying it was his deft leadership and steely-eyed threat to use force that allowed for a diplomatic break.
The real purpose of the speech will be to lay the predicate for a retrospective judgment of journalists and, later, historians. He was the president who warned the world and almost went—but didn’t go—to war to make a point that needed making.
Before or after the speech there will be some quiet leaking to the press that yes, frankly, the president, with so many difficult domestic issues facing him and Congress in the fall, wanted, sympathetically, to let lawmakers off the hook. They never wanted to vote on this.
Once that was true, they didn’t. But now, having seen the polls and heard from their constituents, a lot of them are raring to go, especially Republicans. It is Democrats who were caught in the crosshairs between an antiwar base and a suddenly hawkish president. But again, a Democratic White House can’t admit it put its people in a fix like that.
In any case it’s good for America that we’ve dodged either bad outcome: Congress votes no and the president moves anyway, or Congress votes no and he doesn’t. Both possibilities contained dangers for future presidents.
The president will assert that as a lover of peace he welcomes the Russian move and reports of the positive Syrian reaction, that he will closely monitor the situation, set deadlines. He will speak of how he understands the American people, after the past 12 years, after previous and painful mistakes by their leaders, would feel so reluctant for any military engagement. He not only understands this reluctance, he shares it. He knows he was elected, in part, because he would not think of war as the first, or even second or third, option. But he has a higher responsibility now, and it is to attempt to warn the world of the moral disaster of the use of weapons of mass destruction. If we don’t move in the firmest opposition our children will face a darker future.
The speech will end. Polls will be taken. Maybe a mild uptick, maybe a flatline. Probably more or less the latter—people have made up their mind. They sense the crisis has passed or is passing. They’re not keen for more presidential rhetoric.
* * *
Then get ready for the spin job of all spin jobs. It’s already
begun: the White House is beginning to repeat that a diplomatic solution
only came because the president threatened force. That is going to be
followed by something that will grate on Republicans, conservatives, and
foreign-policy journalists and professionals. But many Democrats will
find it sweet, and some in the political press will go for it, if for no
other reason than it’s a new story line.It is that Syria was not a self-made mess, an example of historic incompetence. It was Obama’s Cuban Missile Crisis—high-stakes, eyeball-to-eyeball, with weapons of mass destruction and an implacable foe. The steady waiting it out, the inner anguish, the idea that crosses the Telex that seems to soften the situation. A cool, calibrated, chancy decision to go with the idea, to make a measured diplomatic concession. In the end it got us through the crisis.
Really, they’re going to say this. And only in part because this White House is full of people who know nothing—really nothing—about history. They’ve only seen movies.
The only question is who plays Bobby. Get ready for a leak war between Kerry’s staff and Hillary Clinton’s
An important thing. The president will be tempted, in his embarrassment, to show a certain dry and contemplative distance from Putin. The Obama White House should go lightly here: Putin could always, in his pique, decide to make things worse, not better. It would be good for Obama to show graciousness and appreciation. Yes, this will leave Putin looking and feeling good. But that’s not the worst thing that ever happened. And Putin has played this pretty well.
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/09/10/making-sense-of-syria/
Our 'Federal Family'?
A few days ago, Kathleen Sebelius, our Secretary of Health and Human Services issued a press release urging everyone to be mindful of potential terror attacks, natural disasters, and pandemics. This was because Sebelius was recognizing that September is National Preparedness Month.Exactly why she conflated preparedness for terror attacks, natural disasters and pandemics in a single sentence must indicate that she never checked in with Janet Napolitano, for whom there are no such things as a terror attacks, merely man-caused disasters.
Sebelius continued in the press release to say:
"While our federal family is becoming better prepared to support the nation, we know that being truly resilient requires the whole community coming together ... Simply put: bystanders can't stand by. We've seen countless times that bystanders are truly the first responders. They save lives. Each of us must be ready to help others when every minute counts." [emphasis supplied] (h/t to Susan Jones at CNSNews)
Some might simply assume that the phrase "federal family" was a poetic effort to create a warm, welcoming feeling while asking people to concentrate and plan on how to react to terrorists, earthquakes and hurricanes, as well as massive pandemics such as bird flu or a re-run of the plague. Those subjects always generate warm and fuzzy emotions, don't they?
Unfortunately, the administration's propaganda department thought it was such a great phrase that they have been using it all over the place.
A few weeks before the Secretary of HHS uttered the phrase, B. Todd Jones, used it when he was being sworn in as the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In his remarks he spoke about the ATF agents who pitched in to help local law enforcement in Aurora, Newtown, Boston, and West Texas: "It's as close as you're going to get to blue-collar law enforcement in the federal family."
The "pitched in" phrase goes so well with the whole "family" image. He tried to make it sound as if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives" wouldn't have acted except for those members of the federal family who selflessly volunteered to pitch in to help in incidents that involved the use of firearms which resulted in the deaths of many family members.
Just a week before Jones was waxing poetic about "out Federal Family", one of Janet Napolitano's minions, David Heyman, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, on August 22nd told a Washington think tank how the town of Joplin, Missouri had recovered from a devastating tornado "in partnership with the federal family."
And on July 10, barely a month before that, Richard Serino, the deputy administrator of FEMA, told a Senate panel that the Boston Marathon bombing "was determined to be a high risk event. This determination resulted in enhanced attention to the event across the federal family..."
Gee, an event, not a terrorist attack but merely an event (like stubbing your toe?), was determined to be a high risk event. And our federal family thought they might want to pay a bit more attention to this event. Yes, that sounds like the reaction of most families, don't you think? Just a typical family's reaction to the death of three of its members and the injuring and maiming of scores more.
Bill Clinton used a similar verbal tactic whenever he mouthed the phrase, "I feel your pain." It harkens back to the old say "This will hurt me more than it will hurt you." Sure it will, Daddy.
Governments have always tried to picture themselves as benevolent parents. All wise, all knowing and always prepared to care for their children. Of course there have been some parents that are actually guilty of child abuse.
The Soviet Union always referred to their nation as "Mother Russia." After all, you just have to love your mother, even as she is killing off millions of your brothers and sisters.
Nazi Germany always called for their citizen's loyalty to the "Fatherland." Make your daddy proud, go kill a Jew.
Any time a government tries selling the idea that we're all one big family, its citizens should prepare for something utterly horrific in the offing.
It's funny that in Sebelius' press release, she never mentioned that particular eventuality while warning us all to get prepared for disasters.
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