John Kerry is still out there beating the drums for war. He is growing increasingly frustrated as no one is buying his spiel. The situation has degraded into a tragic comedy.
Kerry issued Assad an ultimatum. Hand ’em over in one week or we attack:
The US secretary of state has said that President Bashar al-Assad has one week to hand over his entire stock of chemical weapons to avoid a military attack. But John Kerry added that he had no expectation that the Syrian leader would comply.
Kerry also said he had no doubt that Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in east Damascus on 21 August, saying that only three people are responsible for the chemical weapons inside Syria – Assad, one of his brothers and a senior general. He said the entire US intelligence community was united in believing Assad was responsible.
Kerry was speaking on Monday alongside the UK foreign secretary, William Hague, who was forced to deny that he had been pushed to the sidelines by the House of Commons decision 10 days ago to reject the use of UK force in Syria.
And the attack itself would be “unbelievably small”:
“We’re not going to war,” Mr. Kerry told reporters Monday after meeting with British Foreign Secretary William Hague in London. “We will be able to hold [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad accountable without engaging troops on the ground or any other prolonged kind of effort, in a very limited, very targeted, very short-term effort that degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons without assuming responsibility for Syria’s civil war. That is exactly what we are talking about doing; an unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”
Almost immediately the State Department had to issue a retraction:
Kerry delivered the statement almost dismissively and quickly said Assad had no intention of giving up “weapons he denies using.” But it was still the first time such a suggestion had been made by the Obama administration.
The State Department was forced to clarify the remarks, calling them “rhetorical” and making clear its desire to strike could be tempered by a Syrian offer. Kerry’s point, according to spokeswoman Jen Psaki, “was that this brutal dictator with a history of playing fast and loose with the facts cannot be trusted to turn over chemical weapons.”
To further bolster Obama’s seriousness and determination, the White House has dispatched Susan Rice, who mislead the world about the attacks in Benghazi, presumably to mislead the world about Syria.
Susan Rice famously blamed the Benghazi terror attack that took the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, on an Internet video. She further said the terror attack occurred after a spontaneous protest over that anti-Muslim film got out of hand, instead of blaming the al Qaeda backed terrorists responsible for the murders.
“The White House has had quite enough of the controversy over ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, the misleading talking points she used in TV interviews about the jihadist attacks in Benghazi, and the Obama administration’s contradictory narrative about those attacks,” Steve Hayes reported in December.
But today, Rice will be called upon again to make a public case for the White House — this time, she’ll be talking about Syria. Except now Rice is the national security adviser, a promotion she received in the last year.
And our naive UN Ambassador Samantha Power, who actually believed Iran would not tolerate Syria having WMD’s, now suggests that the US act “outside the law” with regard to Syria:
The NPR host pressed, “So let me make sure that I’m clear on this: You’re saying that something needs to be done and it is time to go outside the legal system, outside the legal framework. You believe it is right to do something that is just simply not legal.”
“In the cases of–we’ve seen in the past–there are times when there is a patron like Syria backed by Russia, we saw this in Kosovo as well, where it was just structurally impossible to get meaningful international action through the security council, and yet in this case you have the grave breach of such a critical international norm in terms of the ban on chemical weapons use, it is very important that the international community act so as to prevent further use,” said Power.
My hopes that the sycophantic press would begin to suspend disbelief were dashed entirely when CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin opined that NATO is a suitable substitute for the US Constitution:
FAREED: Jeff you made a distinction I want to understand a little bit better. You were strong about, well, either congressional authority or something from the UN. But the Constitution doesn’t say anything about UN authorization. Presumably, the crucial thing from a constitutional point of view is whether or not you need congressional authorization for the president to act. Why would the UN or NATO be sufficient?
TOOBIN: Fareed, I don’t want to pretend that I think, if you look at the history of the last 30 years, there is a perfectly logically consistent line here. I am advocating a position that I think largely should be followed, has mostly been followed, but I don’t want to pretend that this is some wild aberration if Obama were to have done it on his own.
I think this has really been a practical change to how both Americans and even members of Congress feel about the use of military force. That the sanction of our treaty obligations, whether it’s our obligations in the United Nations or in NATO in the case of Bosnia, those are authorizations in and of themselves for military action. The fact that we are part of the Security Council. When the Security Council authorizes military action, that’s authorization for us. Same with NATO.
You’re right, that is not formally part of the Constitution. But I think as the common law of international law has developed over the past 30 years, I think they are legitimate substitutes for congressional authorization.
All this despite the fact that there is no smoking gun. This has to be shut this down before the last shred of US credibility is gone. They are going to get us all killed.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.