“Secretary of State John Kerry may not have expected his casual suggestion that Syria avert American military action by giving up its chemical weapons to be taken seriously,” the New York Times editorializes. “But it may have created a diplomatic way out for President Obama.”
In a New York Post column, Rich Lowry puts it a million times more pointedly: “Now that John Kerry is the secretary of state, his gaffes can launch major diplomatic initiatives.”
In case you’re not up to date on yesterday’s fast-moving events, here’s what happened, as per London’s Daily Mail. First, Kerry mused out loud that “if Assad handed over his chemical weapons within a week, the U.S. would not attack Syria.”
Russia “backed” the plan and Syria “welcomed” it, prompting Kerry to tell Russia “that he didn’t mean it as a serious proposal.” A White House official told CNN “that Kerry’s comments were a ‘major goof,’ and that he ‘clearly went off-script.’ ”
Apparently that White House official was somebody other than President Obama himself, for by the time he sat for interviews with half a dozen TV networks, he had warmed to the idea: “And, you know, we’ve seen some indications from the Russians as well as the Syrians today, uh, that they may be willing to look at the prospect of getting those weapons under control, perhaps even, uh, international control, and getting them out of there, where they could be vulnerable to use by anybody,” he told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “And that’s something that we’re going to run to ground over the next couple of days.”
By this morning, the secretary of state was crediting the president with pressing the Russians into accepting Kerry’s goofy, off-script idea: “Kerry told a closed meeting of House lawmakers that the Russian government is only seeking to help Syria because they believe the U.S. is serious about taking military action, according to multiple sources present,” Politico reports.
Read it all at the WSJ
and I had to chuckle at this:
If Pelosi had any wit, she’d have tweeted that we have to bomb Syria so we can find out what’s in it.
I think someone already said that.
