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.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/comme...ticle14315072/
Barack Obama, the 98-pound weakling
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Originally Posted by red states rule
