Two weeks of zig-zag foreign policy by President Barack Obama —
marching to war one moment, clinging desperately to diplomacy the next —
culminated Tuesday night, appropriately enough, in a zig-zag address to
the nation that did little to clarify what will come next in the Syria
crisis but shined a glaring hot light on the debate in the president’s
own mind.
The speech began with an earnest statement on behalf of Zig, a sober appreciation that military power has its limits and good intentions don’t necessarily equate to good policy: “I have resisted calls for military action because we cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
But it was followed the next paragraph by some piercingly indignant words making the case for Zag, the conviction that conscience and the obligations of global leadership sometimes require America to act. The aim was to shake a skeptical public out of complacency: “The images from this massacre are sickening: men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath, a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk.”
Zag held the stage in the White House East Room for the next several minutes, denouncing the use of chemical weapons by dictator Bashar Assad’s regime as “a crime against humanity and a violation of the laws of war.”
After listening patiently for several paragraphs, Zig was eager to be heard. Even though Zag maintained “I possess the authority to order military strikes,” the sentence closed with a cautionary note from Zig: “I believed it was right in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security to take this debate to Congress. I believe our democracy is stronger when the president acts with the support of Congress, and I believe that America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together.”
More from Zig: “This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president and more and more burdens on the shoulders of our troops, while sidelining the people’s representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.” (Continues)
The speech began with an earnest statement on behalf of Zig, a sober appreciation that military power has its limits and good intentions don’t necessarily equate to good policy: “I have resisted calls for military action because we cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
But it was followed the next paragraph by some piercingly indignant words making the case for Zag, the conviction that conscience and the obligations of global leadership sometimes require America to act. The aim was to shake a skeptical public out of complacency: “The images from this massacre are sickening: men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath, a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk.”
Zag held the stage in the White House East Room for the next several minutes, denouncing the use of chemical weapons by dictator Bashar Assad’s regime as “a crime against humanity and a violation of the laws of war.”
After listening patiently for several paragraphs, Zig was eager to be heard. Even though Zag maintained “I possess the authority to order military strikes,” the sentence closed with a cautionary note from Zig: “I believed it was right in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security to take this debate to Congress. I believe our democracy is stronger when the president acts with the support of Congress, and I believe that America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together.”
More from Zig: “This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president and more and more burdens on the shoulders of our troops, while sidelining the people’s representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.” (Continues)
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