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To: tejek who wrote (738758)	9/11/2013 12:31:46 PM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 1586313

Dazed And Confused If your foreign policy has to be rescued by a dictator, you are doing it wrong. Slate By William J. Dobson Posted Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2013, at 6:19 PM Excerpt: Give President Obama credit: He has done such a good job of acting unpredictably in the lead-up to his proposed military strikes on Syria that no one knows what he will do next. He has successfully confused ally and enemy alike. Sun Tzu would be proud. But President Obama cannot take all the credit for sowing confusion. Secretary of State John Kerry also has the unique distinction of becoming the first chief American diplomat whose offhand quip at a press conference launched a last-minute, global diplomatic initiative to disarm a murderous dictator. Kerry never thought that he was making a bold bid to avert military strikes that his president’s party and public had no interest in supporting. He simply suggested that if Bashar al-Assad handed all of his chemical weapons over in a week, that might stave off an impending U.S. attack—and of course, Assad wasn’t going to do that. The State Department rushed forward to clarify that Kerry wasn’t floating an actual proposal— he was just speaking rhetorically. You know, riffing. To say that the Obama administration is freelancing when it comes to foreign policy is an insult to freelancers. Still, Vladimir Putin knows an opportunity when he sees it. The Kremlin pounced on Kerry’s diplomatic spitballing. So now, everyone—the French, the British, the Chinese, the Obama administration—is hoping that the Russians can craft a verifiable plan for Assad’s regime to hand over its chemical stockpile. For the West, a price can be exacted from Assad, while the dangerous unpredictability of military strikes can be avoided. Meanwhile, Russia and China can keep their man in Damascus. The sigh of relief from Capitol Hill was audible last night when Obama said that the Russian plan offered a potential breakthrough. Incredibly, Obama had turned to Congress to support his planned strikes—something presidents almost never do—when he didn’t have anything approaching a lock on the votes. It would have been a clever way of forcing Congress to share the blame for acting or not acting in Syria, if it weren’t for the fact that having his foreign policy neutered by Congress would be such a debilitating defeat. If the president thought his own party had his back, he was mistaken. No one believes that the House of Representatives (and maybe even the Senate) was going to sign off on the authorization of force in Syria. But Putin’s late-breaking gambit has prevented Democrats from having to eviscerate their own president’s foreign policy. Putin is providing President Obama political cover that even his own party wouldn’t supply. But if your foreign policy has to be rescued by a dictator, you are doing it wrong. That’s where President Obama finds himself today. Putin is providing Obama an out he couldn’t find for himself. snip The Rest

To: tejek who wrote (738758)	9/11/2013 12:37:07 PM
From: joseffy	1 Recommendation Recommended By TideGlider Respond to of 1586313

Obama's Syria address to the nation flops ........................................................................... http://www.americanthinker.com Thomas Lifson September 11, 2013 It was all too obvious last night that the only reason President Obama gave his speech to the nation was that it would have been too embarrassing to cancel it. The result was inconsistent and unsatisfying at any level. (Transcript here) Obama commandeered the nation's airwaves to call for a "diplomatic pause" in a Congressional vote he requested to affirm a military threat to enforce a red line he doesn't take responsibility for. The first half of his talk was intended to spark moral outrage, recalling his mind's "images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor." But the second half meandered off into Goldilocks territory as he promised to teach Assad a lesson that would be not too small ("The United States military doesn't do pinpricks" -- though SecState Kerry famously claimed it would be "unbelievably small"), and not too big ("I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria). Somehow or other, this man who never wore his nation's uniform, advised by SecDef Hagel, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, will thread the needle in punishing Syria with exactly the right amount of force that won't spark serious retaliation but will deter Assad. Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator notes that the 3 most prominent hawks supporting Obama's Syria initiative are all veterans of a small war that escalated: John McCain wound up as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam in 1967, John Kerry wound up going to Vietnam in 1967 and so too did young Sergeant Hagel arrive on the shores of Vietnam in 1967. Say again: 1967. Which was three years after the President of the United States had solemnly pledged in 1964 - make that repeatedly pledged - that American boys like McCain and Kerry and Hagel would never...repeat never....have to be there in the first place. Besides being implausible, Obama's speech was also internally incoherent. As John Harris of Politico put it, this was a zig-zag speech. The speech began with an earnest statement on behalf of Zig, a sober appreciation that military power has its limits and good intentions don't necessarily equate to good policy: "I have resisted calls for military action because we cannot resolve someone else's civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan." But it was followed the next paragraph by some piercingly indignant words making the case for Zag, the conviction that conscience and the obligations of global leadership sometimes require America to act. The aim was to shake a skeptical public out of complacency: "The images from this massacre are sickening: 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." His policy toward Assad is equally incoherent. Jennifer Rubin paraphrases his message: Chemical weapons use is beyond the pale and different than any weapon. We cannot let it go on. We have a national interest in acting. But I would ask Congress to hold off on voting for me to do anything. We'll consider a deal to have Assad turn over his weapons. But remain in power. There were a couple of technical aspects of the speech that were just off. The teleprompter Obama was reading from (Thank God there was only one and we were spared the tennis match-style head moving back and forth between two of them!) was just a little bit too high, so Obama was not so much looking into the camera as looking above it (and symbolically above our heads). Full Story 0