It looks like Biden's puppet masters have another opportunity to ignore a red line they've laid out. You know, like Obama did so many times.
Explain, please !
The offhand remark spurred a massive success in Syria. Why does the foreign policy establishment consider it a failure?
www.politico.com
Obama’s Red Line, Revisited
The offhand remark spurred a massive success in Syria. Why does the foreign policy establishment consider it a failure?
By DEREK CHOLLET
July 19, 2016
"...By October 2013,
without a bomb being dropped, the Bashar Assad regime
had admitted having a massive chemical weapons
program it had never before acknowledged, agreed to give it up and submitted to a multinational coalition that removed and destroyed the deadly trove. From my perspective at the Pentagon, this seemed like an incontrovertible, if inelegant, example of what academics call “coercive diplomacy,” using the threat of force
to achieve an outcome military power itself could not even accomplish....
The civil war in Syria had dominated the news for more than two years, but few politicians had thought deeply about it, relieved that it was not their problem. None were happy to share the responsibility of being accountable for what America would or would not do about the violence. And, in fact, now that they did share the responsiblility, it became clear that they were as uncertain as the administration had been about the risks of using force—and fears of the possible consequences.
For two weeks, the administration made its case on Capitol Hill, but it soon became clear that most Republicans and Democrats in Congress were against authorizing action—leaving Obama the option of going forward anyway (which he said he would do) or backing down altogether. Then, an unexpected opportunity emerged: During a September 9 news conference in London, Secretary of State John Kerry was asked whether there was anything Assad could do to avoid an attack. Sure, Kerry said in exasperation, the Syrian leader could admit that he had chemical weapons (something he still refused to do) and give them all up peacefully, but “he isn’t about to do it and it can’t be done.” Like Obama’s original red line a year earlier, this offhand remark wasn’t intended to be a policy pronouncement. But soon after Kerry walked off the stage he received a call from his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, who was then meeting with a delegation of Syrian diplomats in Moscow and wanted to talk with the secretary of state about his “initiative.”
Washington and Moscow had deep disagreements over Syria. Russia continued to be one of Assad’s few international backers and, importantly, the Syrian military’s chief supplier. But even Moscow worried about Syria’s chemical weapons. And though earlier talks of U.S.-Russian collaboration to deal with Assad’s stockpile had never led anywhere, the credible threat of U.S. military force suddenly changed the calculation. Now, Moscow was ready to pressure Assad to comply with Kerry’s offhand demand. Maybe this reflected Russian concerns about the proliferation of chemical weapons; or perhaps this was driven by the Kremlin’s desire to keep an ally in power; or possibly Russian leaders were simply trying to stay relevant geopolitically. Whatever the reason, the next day, following a meeting with the Russians in Moscow,
the Syrians publicly admitted for the first time that they had chemical arms and committed to signing the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty banning such weapons. The Syrians were pledging to come clean—and not just to reveal what they had, but to get rid of their chemical weapons altogether.."