How…unexpected. (Not.) John Kerry said it couldn’t be done. Russia is making sure that it won’t, even if it could be.
Russia is not keen at this stage for a binding U.N. Security Council resolution that would provide a framework to control Syria’s chemical weapons’ stocks, France’s foreign minister said after talks with his Russian counterpart on Tuesday.
“As I understood, the Russians at this stage were not necessarily enthusiastic, and I’m using euphemism, to put all that into the framework of a U.N. binding resolution,” Laurent Fabius told French lawmakers after a telephone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Obama is being played. The Russian deal forced him to change course and re-write tonight’s speech at the last minute. Now he has to re-write it again, or pretend that the Russians didn’t just drop a flaming bag of something on the White House doorstep. It will be grimly amusing to see what Obama tells the American people about all this now. The words “fiasco” and “clusterf*ck” have been said by others today. He won’t use either word, but that doesn’t mean both don’t apply.
Harry Reid pretended that the Russia deal drove him to halt a vote on force in the Senate. The reality is that Democrat votes for force were “dropping like flies,” and the prospect of passage in the House was always grim. Obama lost the Congressional Black Caucus today. Sen. Mitch McConnell came out against bombing today, breaking with the House GOP leaders who had supported it, and probably killing off any chance that the Senate would help Obama out by at least giving him a split vote in Congress. The likelihood now is that he gets rejected by both houses with actual “No” votes or implicitly if neither brings the authorization to a vote, and then has to decide if he wants to strike Syria anyway. Does Barry feel lucky?
So Obama is being played by Putin. The question is, does he know or even care that he’s being played? He seemed happy enough to grab Putin’s hand and get out of his jam. Now what’s he going to do? Putin is saying that there will be no quick fix, and that he intends to keep on using the UN to mess around with Obama, promise him a prize, then take it away, over and over again. Playing the part of Lucy, Vlad Putin. Playing the part of Charlie Brown trying to kick a football, Barack Obama. For a while to come.
Russia is also now taking away Obama’s fig leaf that the threat of force is driving this phony weapons deal, by taking the threat of force entirely off the table. Obama is playing cards with Reggie Love, Putin is playing 3D chess like a boss.
Obama and his lieutenants keep saying that if we don’t strike Syria, rogue states will be emboldened. That’s dubious, since Iraq’s two-time use of chemical weapons didn’t send the North Koreans south, but it’s obvious that one massive state is being emboldened by Obama’s Hamlet act: Russia. Putin is using Syria to make Obama a laughingstock and America, irrelevant, in a stroke.
I hate to keep tying the same thing over and over, but this won’t end well.
More: Breaking: Obama Delays Congress Vote, Russia Cancels Emergency UN Meeting on Syria (Update)
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