It seems more and more possible that Syria’s capitulation, for now, with regard to giving up their chemical weapons wasn’t an accidental or altogether fortuitous development.
While Russia is receiving most of the accolades for turning the discussion into something more tangible — and John Kerry’s most notable “gaffe” yesterday as a catalyst — discussing a turnover of the weapons occurred more than a week ago by president Obama at the G20 summit. Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin had a conversation about the merits of proposing that Syria might exchange its chemical weapons for the United States’ abandoning its strikes.
Over the last 48 hours President Obama has been recorded stepping back from bombing Syria in more and more interviews. Putin also added that the idea surfaced last week and gained more momentum — the only change is that Syria finally agreed to the idea. And we have to look at what this means specifically for the debate. It is known that the president faced a difficult task in getting the country on board for yet another military action overseas. Congress is divided, and those who are in favor don’t really want to have this conversation with war-weary constituents who have not just been vocal about their displeasure, but in some cases even demanding that Congress strap on the combat boots and wade into Syria in place of sending more servicemen and women into the region.
As such, The Atlantic Wire reports, “The president is comfortable with Congress delaying votes on the authorization for the use of force. Regardless, he consistently reinforced that it was the threat that the United States might strike which led Syria to accept this possible solution.”
Obama told PBS’ Gwen Ifill that the one could still run its course. “If we can exhaust these diplomatic efforts and come up with a formula that gives the international community a verifiable enforceable mechanism to deal with these chemical weapons in Syria,” he said, “then I’m all for it.”
However, the biggest obstacle is still the fact that the weapons need to be collected, which is why the president is calling this development “modestly positive” and probably lends to the biggest reason why Obama didn’t run with the idea himself — yet if it opens the door for more time and conversation he’ll take it with caution. As Time magazine notes, “the plan is predicated on the idea that the international community can trust Assad to act in good faith.” And as John Kerry in a bit of a Freudian slip all but admitted, it’s possible that it can’t be done.
We may just be back at square one if this is really a false promise, or something so logistically difficult that to proceed would be a huge miscalculation. We’ll have to wait and see, but for now it looks like we should really hold off on the ticker-tape parade.
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