The Patriot Post® · Unserious About Syria

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry drew what amounts to yet another red line, warning Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that he has one week to hand over his entire stock of chemical weapons, or he will face a military attack. What kind of military attack? “We’re not going to war,” Mr. Kerry assured reporters. “We will be able to hold 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.”

The only thing unbelievably small and limited here is the Obama administration’s competence and credibility.

Furthermore, either Kerry has a lot of misplaced confidence, or he has essentially let the cat out of the bag with regard to Congress’s role in this debacle – as in president Obama is going to do what he wants, regardless of whether he gets Congressional approval or not.

Thus it would appear a strike against Syria is in the cards, with the rationale for undertaking this dubious effort – make that the most recent rationale for undertaking this dubious effort – is that we must “send a message” that resonates beyond the Syrian border, namely to the mullahs in Iran.

The effectiveness of such a message was inadvertently revealed by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who was taking the administration’s pitch to the media on Sunday. When State of the Union host Candy Crowley noted the uncomfortable reality that 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and the removal of Saddam Hussein, didn’t alter Iranian behavior, McDonough asserted that the Iranians were likely “very uncomfortable with what their ally chose to do here,” because Iran had been on the receiving end of chemical attacks during the Iraq-Iran war back in the ‘80s.

He then revealed the utter folly of sending the Iranians a message. "As importantly when we lay down, and the international community lays down a red line, as we have now seven times in Security Council Resolutions against the Iranians, saying they cannot develop nuclear weapons, and they continue to do it, we have to make sure they don’t misinterpret where the west is, and misinterpret how we react to Syria, to suggest that they have greater operating space or more wiggle room as it relates to its nuclear program.“

Note the seven red lines that haven’t done squat to deter the Iranians from pursuing their nuclear ambitions, even as we’re supposed to have faith that an "unbelievably small, limited kind of effort” undertaken against their ally will make them see the error of their ways. Make that their jihadist, paving the way for the return of the Hidden Imam that requires the precipitation of total chaos, ways.

Note something else as well. As McDonough says, Syria is Iran’s ally, or more accurately its client state, tasked with the purpose of furthering Iran’s hegemonic ambitions in the region. Thus, attacking Syria is akin to attacking the friend of the schoolyard bully in the hopes of sending the bully a message. Make that the bully’s knife-carrying friend rather than the gun-toting bully, which is the equivalent of obsessing over Assad’s alleged use of gas, while willfully ignoring an apocalyptic Iranian regime’s grim determination to join the nuclear weapons club.

It is important to remember that even as this feckless administration crowed about the great wave of democratization that the Arab Spring was ostensibly all about, to the point where they were more than willing to toss American ally Hosni Mubarak under the bus, the same grand opportunity to undermine an enemy regime in Iran after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the election in 2009, was ignored. Obama didn’t want to “meddle” in Iranian affairs. Meddling in Egypt? Fine. Meddling in Libya and removing another cork from the jihadist bottle, despite the reality that Gaddafi had relinquished his WMDs, also OK – as long as one ignores the reality that Libya is now a disaster. A disaster whose oil producing capabilities have virtually ground to a halt because “militia” fighters have wrested control of major oil facilities from a disintegrating government in the nation where four Americans were killed at Benghazi.

Which brings us to another enlightening moment, again courtesy of McDonough, who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell Fox News’ Chris Wallace why the same Abd Ahmed Abu Khattala, charged by the administration as a participant in that attack, remains unarrested – even as has has been interviewed by the AP, CNN, and the New York Times. “Look, we’ve been very clear that we will hold those people who carried out this dastardly, heinous attack against our people to account," McDonough contended. Wallace cut throughout the nonsense. "It’s been a year, sir,” he responded.

In three more weeks it will also be a year that Mark Basseley Youssef, who produced the video this administration shamefully blamed for the Benghazi attack, will have spent in jail.

Yet here we are a year later, having lived through that orchestrated and despicable lie, and both the American public and Congress are supposed to take this administration’s contention regarding Syria alleged use of gas as the gospel truth, along with the idea that our response to it will be “an unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”

Or are we? Soon after Kerry drew his red line, State Department deemed it “rhetorical.” According to spokeswoman Jen Psaki, Kerry was only making the point that “this brutal dictator with a history of playing fast and loose with the facts cannot be trusted to turn over chemical weapons.” Only an Obama administration utterly oblivious to its own hypocrisy could accuse someone else of playing fast and loose with the facts, even as it has stonewalled investigations into the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal, the IRS abuses, the seizing of journalists’ phone records, Benghazi, and the top-secret security leaks that may have led to the deaths of 22 members of SEAL Team 6 in Afghanistan.

Yet such hypocrisy pales in comparison to the lack of credibility and competence demonstrated by the president on down. It is so blatant and all-ecompassing, that former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz believes it is being orchestrated on purpose. “The key to understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing statement he made in the week before being elected president: ‘We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.’ To those of us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original ‘community organizer,’" he writes.

Podhoretz then illuminates what he believes is the president’s motivation. "As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country’s power and influence.”

Pick your poison, my fellow Americans. Either the Obama administration’s lack of credibility and incompetence is by accident or design. But either way, it is real, unrelenting and dangerous. Above all else, that is the “message” this administration is sending to the world.

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