So I threatened to write this, and then decided I needed to follow through.
I'm pretty involved in political minutia most of the day. NPR on my car radio, an obscenely bloated e-mail inbox with daily missives from 20 leftish organizations, a Facebook page that is dedicated to my many and far-flung relatives, a few trusted friends and several lefty groups, including The Pragmatic Progressive and Upworthy, frequent drop-ins on Daily Kos, The People's View, and a few other sites I enjoy.
I'm a really fast reader and have an eidetic memory for things that interest me, but a great weakness in my memory of where I found those things.
Watching the Syria drama unfold over the last couple of weeks has been interesting, infuriating, confusing, and all too often has made me wonder if there are any thinkers left in this country. I'm innately anti-war. I was politically active against the Vietnam War before I was old enough to vote because my parents were activists. My father's activism stemmed from his philosophy and his spirituality. My mother's was probably more driven by being the mother of 3 sons who would one day be cannon fodder.
I object to war on political, philosophical, spiritual, and humanist grounds. It's a stupid way to solve problems. We're supposed to be smart, the apex of species. It's pretty simple for me. I get that WWII was the good war, I also read about the bombing of Dresden and the shadows on the steps that survived in Hiroshima. I believe it could have been avoided with diplomacy and some smart saber rattling.
Listening and reading yesterday and today to the plethora of opinions about Obama's clumsiness, his inability to sell a war to the American people, his stunning defeat in Great Britain, Putin's cleverness, Kerry's bumbling, etc ad nauseum has pretty much convinced me that we have very few people left who are capable of serious thought, especially regarding complex and nuanced problems.
What I'm hearing and reading is glossy superficialities for the most part, a whole bunch of pundits and reporters and experts who don't seem to have amassed the background information a cranky blogger/reader in Central Texas has stumbled across.
I've decided to just lay out what I've seen, read and surmised. I'm making predictions. I have no superpowers that allow me to see the future so I'm freely admitting I could be dead ass wrong.
And I'm thanking President Obama for being smart enough, savvy enough, and educated enough about the Middle East to put his ego in his back pocket and take the risk of explaining complicated factors to a Twitter population.
What stands out for me, from the beginning, is that President Obama has never suggested that there's a good military solution to Syria, in fact he states repeatedly that diplomatic, political solutions are the only relatively decent outcome here.
He has been engaged in diplomacy since the start of the Syrian uprising. He hasn't suggested military interference because he's aware that there are multiple factions with widely disparate agendae warring for control of a state that has no central interest in what they're selling. There is no UN activity regarding Syria because Russia blocks every attempt. He first suggested to Putin that Assad turn over his Chemical Weapons to a third party in 2012, at the G20 Summit in Cabo. (Confirmed) It's likely that he floated that same notion last week. It's likely that Secretary Kerry is not a bumbling fool but a point man for proposing a solution that ends the need for missile strikes while keeping the sabers rattling.
Here's the reason I think this was thought out and laid out in advance. Despite what I read here, in exhausting detail, about Obama's weakness as a politician and a negotiator, I am unable to agree with those arguments.
We have here a young, nearly unknown black man, early in his political career, a man with a Muslim name, who wins two fucking elections by major margins in a country with a strong racist, xenophobic edge. He won twice, while RWers called him a monkey boy, published pictures of his wife photoshopped to look like a chimpanzee, circulated racist jokes and e-mails, and fought desperately to deny his legitimacy. He won twice, and I'm supposed to believe he did that by being a bad politician, a weak orater, a lousy negotiator, a RW wannabe. I'm blonde, not stupid. Take that nonsense out for a ride somewhere else.
The simple fact of his wins tells me everything I need to know about how good a politician, talker, and thinker Obama is.
The structure of his comments leading up to turning decision-making over to Congress regarding Syria was crystal clear.
The world drew that Red Line almost a hundred years ago.
There is a moral imperative to keep that line drawn.
There is not any effective military solution to this action, the best possible outcome is diplomatic.
I will take military action if there's no diplomatic action taken.
I prefer to have Congress back me.
(In between his public statements he was not likely eating popcorn and watching The Avengers.)
Putin seems to have left the G20 Summit with a sense that Obama was winning more international support than had been believed possible. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that Obama was working hard for that support, that he was getting it, and that the scene was about to change.
I'm also going to suggest that the idea of baiting Putin into putting his ass on the line was not unattractive to Obama. We're seeing, within 24 hours of Putin's brilliant masterstroke of diplomatic one-up-manship, his waffling, back-peddling, fulminating efforts to defang Obama's power to strike at Assad while defending Assad from any UN action that would hold him accountable for his promises.
I suspect that part of the point of agreeing to Putin's proposal was the prospect of getting the nation and the rest of the world to pay attention to why the UN is unable to act as a peacekeeper. Putin is front and center right now, his prevaricating is not going to play well with a public that called him savior yesterday. He made promises, he claimed the moral, political high ground because his ego is too big to resist the limelight, or the chance to put Obama in a bad light.
What makes me sad about this is that I feel pretty sure that if the UN calls Putin's bluff, if he's forced to put up or shut up, if the Security Council decides this one veto shit needs to stop, if Assad is forced to follow through on the deal regardless of Putin's machinations, there will still be opiners who are unable to see that this was a master stroke by a brilliant politician, one that avoided the usual war games and began to change the way we solve our problems.
I'm going to watch this unfold, with my optimistic outlook intact. I'm going to watch as Obama outs Putin, as he keeps to the point - do it or pay the consequences - and I believe what I'll see is that diplomatic solution, in record time.