"The Right’s Sickening Syria Spin"

[applegrove]

The Right’s Sickening Syria Spin

by Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/16/the-right-s-sickening-syria-spin.html

"SNIP......................................



don’t know about you, but I’m not very interested in being lectured that Bashar al-Assad has no real intention of giving up his chemical weapons by the very same people who a decade ago were pushing this country into war—and having the deranged gall to call the rest of us unpatriotic—on the argument that there was no possible way a monster like Saddam Hussein had given up his chemical weapons. Barack Obama has been forced to spend about 70 percent of his presidential energies trying to repair crises foreign and domestic that these people created, and forced to do so against their iron opposition on all fronts; and now that he’s achieved a diplomatic breakthrough, they have the audacity to argue that he sold America out to Vladimir Putin? It’s staggering and sickening.


But here was Newt Gingrich on television yesterday: “You have Putin playing chess and Obama playing, frankly, a very lucky game of tic-tac-toe. Putin stepped in to maximize Russian influence in the Middle East. That is a strategic defeat for the United States.” What Gingrich is still even doing on television is the first mystery, perhaps solvable by consulting Nostradamus or some ancient Mayan codex; but there he was puffing and huffing, playing with the phrase made famous back during the Libyan adventure by saying Obama was now “following from behind.”


On another network, there was John McCain (are these shows just going to end when he retires?) asserting that the deal was empty because the Russians “will not agree to the use of force no matter what” Assad does, which my colleague Christopher Dickey wrote yesterday is not in this fact the case.


Of course, it might end up being true—indeed it will almost certainly end up being true—that the deal cannot be fully and perfectly enforced. To point that out is to belabor the obvious. But the real questions are two. The first doesn’t concern Assad at all but is rather: can the deal be enforced well enough that these weapons are kept out of the hands of the al Qaeda–affiliated fighters in the region and other extremist groups? We don’t know the answer today, obviously. But surely the presence of international monitors, and the stern timeline of the deal, make it less possible.


......................................SNIP"