By Julia Ioffe, The New Republic
This, apparently, is how diplomacy happens these days: Someone
makes an off-hand remark at a press conference and triggers an
international chain reaction that turns an already chaotic and complex
situation completely on its head, and gives everyone a sense that,
perhaps, this is the light at the end of the indecision tunnel.
Speaking in London next to British Foreign Secretary William Hague on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said
that perhaps the military strike around which the administration has
been painfully circling for weeks could be avoided if Bashar al-Assad can
"turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the
international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it,
without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that.”
The fact that Kerry immediately followed with, “But
he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously,” didn't seem
to bother anyone. (Probably because they were focusing on his other
slip-up: calling the promised strikes "unbelievably small.")
The Russians immediately jumped on the impromptu proposal, calling Kerry to check if he was serious before going live with their proposal to lean on Syria. An hour later, they trotted out
Syria's foreign minister, Walid al-Mouallem, who said he too was down
with the proposal, which was a strange way to get the Syrians to finally
admit they even had chemical weapons to begin with. Before
long, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, the English, and the
French were all on board, too.
Meanwhile, back in
Washington, the White House was just as surprised as anyone. Asked if
this was a White House plan that Kerry had served up in London, Deputy
National Security Advisor Tony Blinken was unequivocal. "No, no, no," he
said. "We literally just heard about this as you did some hours ago."
So that's good. At least everyone's on the same page.
While
the Russians are already cutting deals and drumming up promises from
the Syrians—with whom, as they've insisted for years, they have no
leverage—and as the world lines up on the off-ramp, the White
House was still marshalling its case for a military strike, trotting out
National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, and poor Tony Blinken, who was left making the case for two
mutually exclusive things: "We'll talk to the Russians," he kept
repeating even as he hammered on the intelligence and the need to
degrade, deter, et cetera, et cetera.
Last night, President Barack Obama, who, just over a week ago, had said he was ready to act, tells
the nation's cable watchers that he's now discussing this bogus plan
with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that he's "going to take this
very seriously" while also not letting up on the drumbeat of military
strikes while. On Tuesday, Syria said it had accepted Russia's proposal and France said it would seek the UN Security Council's backing for the proposal.
This,
in other words, is no light at the end of the tunnel. This, to borrow a
phrase from a Congressional staffer at his wits' end, "IS AN UNMITIGATED CLUSTERFUCK."
What
happened was Kerry went off message and, as has been his wont as
Secretary of State, off the reservation, and violated the cardinal rule
of official press conferences: He answered a hypothetical question in a
hypothetical way. He blurted out a pie-in-the-sky, hyperbolic idea—getting rid of "every single bit" of the chemical weapons scattered across Syria "in the next week"—but everyone seized on it as a realistic proposal. It's not.
First,
how do you deal with a regime that only admits it has chemical weapons
under the threat of impending military intervention? Or that uses
chemical weapons while a team of U.N. inspectors is there to investigate the prior use of chemical weapons, in the same city?
Second,
that handful of chemical weapons storage and mixing facilities are just
the ones we know about, and, now that the U.S. has been loudly beating
the war drum for weeks, Assad has been moving
his troops and weapons around. If we thought getting to "beyond a
reasonable doubt" with the intelligence on the August 21 chemical attack
was hard, imagine us getting to "every single bit."
Third,
negotiating with the Russians and the Syrians about what "every single
bit" and what disposing them mean will certainly take more than "the
next week." Both Moscow and Damascus have all the time in the world, and
the Kremlin, which has never met a legal norm it couldn't waltz around,
will quibble and hair-split and insist that this is all done
legally—whatever that means in Moscow.
Fourth, the mechanics of disposing these chemical weapons are far from straightforward. Quoth the Times:
"flying [the chemical weapons] out of the country is not as simple as
picking up nuclear components—as the United States did in Libya in late
2003—and moving them to a well-guarded site in Tennessee."
Fifth,
and most important, is the fact that Assad giving up his chemical
weapons was only part of the stated objective. If you listened to the
White House pitch closely, the point of the military strike was not just
to stop Assad from using chemical weapons further on his citizens, and
it was not just to warn other rogue leaders with their fingers on
various triggers. Part of the goal was to force a political solution
that would remove Assad from power. That is, even though the Obama
administration has been insisting that it is not interested in "regime
change," that disastrous cornerstone of the Bush era, it was, in fact,
pursuing regime change, at least until Monday.
On
August 21, just hours after the sarin attack in Ghouta, a Damascus
suburb, had occurred, Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest spoke of the
failure of international pressure to achieve a key administration goal: "We've seen evidence and indications that the Assad regime is feeling that pressure, but you're right that we have not—that
it has not resulted in the outcome that we would like to see, which
is Assad being completely removed from power," Earnest said. "That’s not
just the preference of the United States of America, that’s the will of
the Syrian people and that’s why it's important." This was
what Senator John McCain managed to pry from General Martin Dempsey
during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week, that
the goal of
a military strike was "to change the military equation on the
battlefield," and what he worked into the committee's resolution to
authorize the use of force in Syria. This, the administration has
insisted, was what made the military option so important: creating the
opening for a diplomatic solution.
Well, on Monday,
the administration argued, correctly, that the threat of a strike has
done just that. "I don't think we would have gotten to this point unless
we had maintained a credible possibility for a military strike," Obama said
in an interview with ABC, adding, "and I don't think now is the time
for us to let up on that." But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has
already scrapped
the vote on the authorization of the use of force. And, given how bleak
the vote count was looking pre-Kerry gaffe, and given how audible the
sigh of relief from the Hill was, it's clear to everyone that the jig is
up. Now that there's a semblance of a diplomatic option, the military
option has evaporated. "The momentum is moving against us," said
one Senate staffer. "We’re on track to lose this thing. Our folks are
dropping like flies."
There
are two clear winners in this slow-motion train wreck, and they are not
Obama or Kerry. They are Assad and Putin. Both wanted, for their own
reasons, to avert a military strike, and a military strike was averted.
Putin insisted on a diplomatic solution while doing everything to make a
diplomatic solution impossible, and now he gets his phony,
unenforceable diplomatic solution. Assad wanted to go on killing his
opposition, and he will continue to do so.
Obama, on the other
hand, found himself constantly check-mated, either by his own hand, or,
this time, by Kerry's. First, he drew a red line on chemical weapons,
seemingly by accident. Then, he all but ignored chemical weapons use by
Assad until the evidence forced itself on the world. Then he agonized on
whether to act, while Dempsey and the Pentagon rolled him, leaking
their military plans to anyone who would listen, "probably," said one
insider, "because they didn't want to act." Then, he talked about how
limited the strikes would be, all while Assad moved his men and his guns
into residential areas and the Russians moved their ships in. Then, out
of nowhere, he decided to take it to Congress. "The president
says that he’s going to launch strikes and then, suddenly, he’s going to
Congress. It's probably one of the more incredible things I’ve ever
seen," McCain told me. "We were all dumbfounded," said another Senate
staffer.
Then came the persuasion of Congress, a
legislative body that can't even pass a farm bill, or a gun-control
measure favored by a crushing majority of the American people. The
president didn't call Congress back, so instead, congressmen and
senators got spend nearly two weeks marinating not in the intelligence,
but in the vehement opposition of their constituents. Those that were in
town—like the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—were
rushed through the process of putting together a resolution before they
even heard the classified briefing. Others, relative moderates like
Republicans Saxby Chambliss and Kelly Ayotte who would normally support
such a measure, complained that the briefings were vague and short on
specifics.
Obama, meanwhile, took off for Sweden,
and, as the town halls roiled with anger, put off his address to the
country for the following week. While abroad, he managed to further
humiliate himself in the eyes of Putin, who already sees him as weak.
Obama, having just called off his bilateral summit with Putin because
Russia granted asylum to Edward Snowden, went ahead and met with Putin
anyway. It was a pointless meeting—"We both stuck to our guns," Putin said afterwards—but in Russia, the message was unmistakable: Putin is stronger, and Putin won.
Meanwhile,
back home, the nays fell into place and the yeahs became fewer and
fewer, and the talk in Washington was about what Obama will do if
Congress says no? Or if the Senate says yes but the House says no? And
just when it couldn't get any more discombobulated, Kerry opened the
door to a nonsense Russian diplomatic solution, just three days after
Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said publicly it would
be naive to count on Russia diplomatically.
As it stands now, Russia and France
have taken the lead on working out a plan to get Assad to hand over his
chemical weapons, a lead Obama seems all too happy to relinquish.
Hammering out the details will take a some time, and, while they're at
it, Assad will still have his chemical weapons but will no longer be
under the threat of a U.S. military strike. (Who knows if he'll use
them, but he certainly hasn't let up
on the conventional shelling.) Putin has succeeded in throwing sand in
the gears of the American political process and separating the U.S. from
its allies, and the current American handwringing over Syria seems
likely to grind on for weeks. And a pro-Assad paper ran with the
following headline this morning:
'Moscow and Damascus Pull the Rug Out From Under the Feet of Obama.'
Meanwhile,
the president is supposed to address the nation tonight. He was
supposed to make the case for military action, but his advisors spent
Monday night frantically reworking the speech. What will he say? What
can he say?
But, suffer not ye little children! The Obama administration is quickly growing après la bataille gonads as they rewrite history...
BuzzFeed: Administration Changes Russian Proposal’s Origin Story: Back-dating a policy.
By Rosie Gray
The Obama Administration’s explanation of how a
Russian proposal to get rid of Syrian chemical weapons came to be has
morphed rapidly in the past 24 hours from being portrayed as an
unexpected slip-up to — in its new incarnation — a plan that U.S.
officials were involved in as early as last week.
“I had some
conversations about this with my counterpart from Russia last week,”
Secretary of State John Kerry said during a House Armed Services
Committee hearing on Tuesday, referring to Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov. “President Putin raised the issue with President Obama at
St. Petersburg. President Obama directed us to try to continue to talk
and see if it is possible. So it is not something that — you know,
suddenly emerged, though it did publicly. But it cannot be allowed to be
a delay.”
Later, under questioning by Rep. Hank Johnson, Kerry
said he had not made a mistake when he suggested the proposal in a press
conference in London on Monday.
“I didn’t misspeak,” Kerry said. “I was asked about it. I responded because I was asked.”
A
State Department official confirmed to BuzzFeed that Kerry and Lavrov
had spoken about getting rid of Assad’s chemical weapons stockpiles last
week.
“He has been talking with the Russians about importance of
securing chemical weapons back to his trip to Moscow and before,” the
official said. “That is what he was talking about.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin mentioned the Kerry-Lavrov discussions in a speech
on Tuesday, saying he had instructed the two diplomats to “get in
touch” and “try to move this idea forward” and that he and Obama had
“indeed discussed” the idea on the sidelines of the G-20.
The
administration has quickly changed its line on an idea that it scrambled
to play down yesterday in the White House and State Department
briefings even as the Russians immediately followed up by making the
proposal to the Syrians, who “welcomed” it.
Kerry “was making a
rhetorical statement about a scenario that we find highly unlikely,”
State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters
yesterday.
Harf said the administration would “take a hard look”
at the proposal but that “we have serious and deep skepticism that the
Syrian regime would actually do this.” She presented the plan as purely a
Russian proposal, saying that “the Secretary was not making a
proposal.”
Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken echoed
Harf in the White House briefing on Monday, telling reporters that “I
believe [Kerry] was answering questions, speaking hypothetically about
what if Assad were to do this.”
A senior administration official even described Kerry’s statement as a “major goof” to CNN.
The
administration’s tone changed abruptly Monday night, with President
Obama himself throwing his weight behind the idea in a series of
television interviews.
“It’s certainly a positive development
when the Russians and Syrians both make gestures towards dealing with
these chemical weapons,” Obama said, while cautioning that the plan will
only make sense if it is “real.”
The shift comes as support for
the administration’s Syria war plan dwindles on Capitol Hill, and as
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has delayed a plan test vote on
Wednesday to see whether the Russian plan will work out. And a plan that
yesterday looked like a slip of the tongue is now being fed into the
international policy machine, as Obama has agreed to a United Nations
discussion and potential U.N. Security Council resolution — bringing the
Syria issue back to the international community the administration
wanted to bypass.
More BuzzFeed:
More BuzzFeed:
President Obama’s 9 Key Blunders Of The Syria Conflict So Far: Rough road to Damascus.
1. The Syrian Track
When President Obama first came to
office in 2009 he — and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — hoped that what one State Department
official called the “Syrian-Israeli track” would open a door to peace
in the Middle East. It may not have been a crazy idea — but it never
went anywhere.
2. Ignoring Syria
As the “Arab Spring” spread and
protesters sought to unseat President Bashar al-Assad, the Obama
Administration had tough words, but little action. “President Obama’s
reluctance to engage in Syria has been understandable. Perhaps he now
understands that disengagement also has consequences, many of them
unintended,” his former top Syria aide, Fred Hof, wrote recently.
3. Mixed Messages To The Syrian Rebels
The US promised weapons and support — and repeatedly hinted
at more. They even sent weapons, indirectly, to some rebel groups. But
the talk may have done more harm than good, fueling Assad’s attacks
without ever providing enough arms to turn the tide of war.
4. Drawing the 'Red Line'
“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line
for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving
around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would
change my equation,” the president said on August 20, 2012. But there
appears to have been no clear plan to enforce that line amid growing
evidence of some chemical weapons use in Syria.
5. A Promise of Consequences
Secretary of State John Kerry blamed
the Syrian government for the “moral obscenity” of chemical attacks —
and promised that “President Obama believes there must be accountability
for those who use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s
most vulnerable people.” So far, there hasn’t been any.
6. Not Confident Enough For War?
The Administration — operating in the shadow
of the Bush Administration’s misleading case for the Iraq war — at
times appeared to lack confidence in its case that Assad’s regime was
behind the chemical weapons strikes, as in this intelligence assessment released on August 30.
7. An Abrupt Detour To Congress
President Obama’s decision to put
strikes on Syria to a vote won broad praise from Capitol Hill — but
nobody pretended it had been part of anything resembling a plan.
8. Gaffe Central
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s
testimony to sell the war was widely panned, and privately credited with
pushing at least one Senator into opposition. Secretary of State John
Kerry, meanwhile, had to walk back a suggestion that he’d send American
soldiers to Syria.
9. The Winner
The White House engaged in a
years-long standoff with Russian President Vladimir Putin over how to
deal with Syria — then played straight into his hands, making Assad’s
key patron look both relevant and responsible.
About those gonads...
– Vladimir Putin, 10 September 2013
And...
‘Assad must go further than giving up his chemical weapons.’
– John Kerry, 10 September 2013
How did Putin react to the new bluster from Kerry, who is claiming that his gaffeplomacy wasn't really gaffeplomacy?
He has cancelled the 4PM UN Security Council meeting pending a promise from the administration that it is taking the threat to use military force against Assad off the table, of course.
What was supposed to be on the menu at this meeting?
The Russians' Syria Initiative!!!
The Security Council was to debate Russia's proposal concerning Assad's chemical weapons.
And, guess what?
The Russians have withdrawn their proposal, even more 'OF COURSE!'
What was supposed to be on the menu at this meeting?
The Russians' Syria Initiative!!!
The Security Council was to debate Russia's proposal concerning Assad's chemical weapons.
And, guess what?
The Russians have withdrawn their proposal, even more 'OF COURSE!'
Related:
Syria Crisis: The Great Gamble
http://tinyurl.com/mhvdl97
No comments:
Post a Comment