Obama's Syria Spin
By Matthew Vadum
Even with the assistance of his media minions, President Obama is failing to articulate any kind of a rational defense of the administration’s nonsensical, on-again, off-again policy toward Syria.
Yet somehow despite Obama’s bumbling on the domestic and world stages, Russia and the United States agreed Saturday to take custody of Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons by the middle of next year. Syria is required to hand over an inventory of the illicit weapons within a week.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the pact will be backed up by a UN Security Council resolution. Noncompliance could lead to sanctions or other actions, he said. Kerry said the inspections could begin by November and that destruction of the weapons could get underway in 2014. Assad sent a letter Thursday to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon promising that he will sign the international treaty that bans chemical weapons today.
Then the games will begin. The parties are likely to negotiate the same kind of weapons inspections regime that the world saw in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kim Jong-il’s North Korea. Even if inspectors are allowed to locate and examine the weapons, it is far from clear how they will be able to seize and destroy them while Syria’s increasingly brutal two-and-a-half year-old civil war continues to rage.
Obama is now claiming that this supposed diplomatic victory is related to his effort to obtain authorization from Congress to use force against the Syrian regime. In fact Obama backed away from the congressional push when it became obvious that Congress would have turned him down.
This means that unless Obama was willing to cause a constitutional crisis by acting against Syria without congressional approval, there was no credible threat to use force.
But happily things still turned out according to his secret master plan, Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
It may not have appeared “smooth and disciplined and linear,” but it’s working, he offered.
“I’m less concerned about style points. I’m much more concerned with getting the policy right,” said Obama who has been using the Syrian regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons as a pretext for helping al-Qaeda and the other Islamofascist terrorists now fighting Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
Obama then acknowledged an assist provided by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s diplomatic plan has put the U.S. “definitely in a better position,” Obama said.
“My entire goal throughout this exercise is to make sure what happened on Aug. 21 does not happen again,” Obama said, referring to a large-scale chemical weapons attack outside Damascus that he claimed killed more than 1,400 civilians.
“We have the possibility of making sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
Leftist lapdogs who earn their living whitewashing Obama’s record continue to push the president’s proposed alliance with al-Qaeda in Syria without acknowledging that Obama wants to work with the same people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon just 12 years ago.
Obama-worshippers deal in different ways with the unpleasantness of the cognitive dissonance they experience from defending the president.
For example, at Daily Kos, senior policy editor Jed Lewison mocked Syrian President Assad for his self-serving but factually accurate observation about the enemy he’s fighting in Syria.
During Charlie Rose’s recent English-language interview with Assad on CBS, the dictator said the U.S. should not attack the Syrian government because doing so “is going to support al-Qaeda and the same people that kill[ed] Americans in the 11[th] of September.”
Although it is an objective fact that Obama is supporting al-Qaeda, which orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and is a major player in the coalition fighting Assad, Lewison criticizes Assad by name instead of Obama:
Personally, I find Assad’s scaremongering against attacking about as convincing as I find the scaremongering in favor of attacking, but I guess at least there’s one thing that that the scaremongers can all agree on: That if you’re not with them, then you’re with Al Qaeda.Lewison, a former mouthpiece for Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), is also editor of Daily Kos TV.
A Media Matters blogger who has strategized with Obama at the White House also doesn’t seem to grasp that the president wants to arm al-Qaeda.
After Ayman al-Zawahiri called last week for Muslims to attack inside the U.S., Obama supplicant Oliver Willis denounced the al-Qaeda leader on Twitter. “[T]his ass can’t die quick enough,” wrote Willis without a hint of irony.
Fresh from humiliating Obama, Putin plans to visit Tehran to help craft a strategy for Iran’s nuclear program, which is believed to be a front for developing nuclear weapons.
Obama is eager to bow before the new leader of the Islamofascist regime in Tehran, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, and has acknowledged reaching out to him. A meeting between the two may take place at the United Nations as soon as this week.
Obama said he is cautiously optimistic that Putin will be a reliable partner in the process in Syria, while at the same time slighting him. “I don’t think that Mr. Putin has the same values that we do,” Obama said, replying to the Russian president’s controversial New York Times op-ed that rejected “American exceptionalism.”
Funny. It was just two years ago that Obama pronounced the idea of American exceptionalism meaningless by saying that every country believes it is exceptional.
“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” Obama said at the time.
In this, Obama and Putin are on the same page.
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