A Brilliant Mess
By TIMOTHY EGAN
After a staggering display of mush, muddle and miscues by the world’s lone superpower, a rogue nation appears ready to give up the chemical weapons it supposedly never had. Without a shot’s being fired. This, of course, is a miserable failure in the eyes of the gaseous class, amateur hour in real time, because, well — it wasn’t planned.
How you can you have 10 days that shook the world when it was never gamed out, move by move, by the pedigreed cardinals of geopolitical intrigue? The answer is in the very thing that my colleague-for-a-day, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, decried in his self-serving opinion piece on Thursday — American exceptionalism.
It was little noticed, but President Obama made a point of highlighting the special burden of “the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.” He used those words twice — once in deciding to give Congress a say on striking Syria, and again in the Tuesday night speech pleading his case.
That democracy, in all its messy, inconsistent, incoherent cacophony, was there for the world to watch in the September standoff. Some of it was pigs-fly-thrilling — hard-right conservatives joining voices with peacenik libs. Some of it was comic — John McCain playing poker on his cellphone while Congress mulled a military strike. Much of it was appalling. This what happens when you let 535 elected representatives have an actual role in foreign policy.
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