My reaction to the president’s address on Syria:
During his prime time address to the nation regarding the Syrian crisis (transcript, full video), the president made a strong case for why we should care about Bashar al-Assad’s production and use of chemical weapons, sarin and mustard gas, on his own people, and described in harrowing detail why exactly the United States has a responsbility to act in the region, saying, “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.”
But what was truly hard-nosed about the address was how the president, in the face of a potential disarmament deal with Russia and Syria, and in the face of Vladimir Putin insisting that this deal is predicated upon the U.S. pledging not to strike, continued to speak as if the military might still attack Syria in defiance of Putin’s insistence, thus potentially upending the deal.
I’ll be very interested to see where we are on Wednesday and how Moscow reacts to the president’s continued mobilization for an attack. The most generous concession he offered Putin on this front was to announce the postponement of the congressional authorization vote, following up Harry Reid’s pledge of the same earlier in the day. The president was clear: the commander-in-chief decides when and how our armed forces are deployed — not the president of Russia.
So the president will continue to mobilize our military assets in the Mediterranean, while U.S. intelligence operatives on the ground will continue to track whether Assad is exploiting the delay by absconding his stockpiles elsewhere. (Yes, there are technically U.S. “boots on the ground” already — we had this talk during the Libya crisis. When the president says “boots on the ground,” he specifically means soldiers.)
The Obama administration is clearly wagering on the fact that military pressure brought to bear against Syria is the catalyst — the butt-puckering motivation for the Assad regime to, as I wrote yesterday, blink… [CONTINUE READING]