Well, President Obama has passed his first hurdle in getting authority from Congress (authority he knows he already possesses, which I’m sorry, I just can’t stop pointing out) to take military action against the Assad regime in response to crimes against humanity.
The authority the panel’s resolution grants is limited, but not all that limited:
The Senate committee’s version, released late Tuesday by a bipartisan group of senators, would permit up to 90 days of military action against the Syrian government and bar the deployment of U.S. combat troops in Syria, while allowing a small rescue mission in the event of an emergency. The White House also would be required within 30 days of enactment of the resolution to send lawmakers a plan for a diplomatic solution to end the violence in Syria.
Opening a hearing Wednesday afternoon to consider amendments to the resolution, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said it was “tightly tailored” to give the president the necessary authority but “does not authorize” the use of U.S. ground troops in Syria. The committee subsequently rejected, by a 14-4 vote, an amendment from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would have imposed further restrictions by invoking provisions of the 1973 War Powers Resolution…
Still… it really bothers me for a commander in chief to go into a combat situation with his options for response to the situation limited. Dwight Eisenhower, who oversaw one of the most complex military plans in human history, the invasion of Normandy, famously and correctly said that before the battle begins, plans are everything. After the first shot is fired, they are nothing. You have to be able to react to the situation.
But this is about as good as it could get on the course that the president has chosen.
Unfortunately, it’s probably as good as it’s going to get, what with Rand Paul planning another of his filibuster stunts on the Senate floor, and the House prepared to do what it does best — pose and posture and demonstrate utter disregard for the responsibilities of governing.
Related Posts
Oh, and in related news, the president said this:
I haven’t seen video of that. I hope it doesn’t sound a petulant as it looks in text.
I mean, he’s right that we’re talking about a line the world drew a long time ago. But… well, I just hoped it sounded right the way he said it. We don’t need the POTUS traveling around the world (he said this in Sweden) saying, “Hey, don’t look at ME. I don’t use judgment or anything…”
I find the use of “Red Lines” to be offensive to our indigenous Americans. Please begin using “Crimson Vectors” from hence forth.
Garnet Chords, please! This is Gamecock Country!
Native American Lines is the preferred term these days.
POTUS never sounds petulant or anything other than matter of fact.I do miss Bill Clinton, in this regard.
How about POTUS using Bill to sell Obamacare! Good call!
No mention of our local Representative’s response?
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) is very suspicious about why President Barack Obama wants to bomb Syria, not because Wilson doesn’t believe the administration’s chemical weapons claims but because he has a hunch that the call for air strikes is designed to distract from issues like the implementation of Obamacare.
Right! Of course! Obama got Assad to gas his people just to distract us!
Irrelevant, the fact is Obama is using this excuse to deflect the heat currently on him by taking the ever popular use of military force knee-jerk reaction. There’s a battle to join somewhere in the world at any given time, this just happens to be the hot topic of the day.
So what is Obama plan, lob a bunch of missiles into Syria (after giving them a couple weeks notice to move personnel and equipment) and run? Does spending millions of dollars to bomb empty buildings really accomplish anything? How is he going to handle any potential counter-attack? He said there will be no boots on the ground. Bad things happen when you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.
Joe and Obamacare…They are as symbiotic as Joe and jobs.
We have seven lightweights in Congress; a pretty sad state of representation. I trust them all to vote without regard to thoughtfulness, history or morality. It’s just that with Syria, the stakes are higher than they seem able to comprehend – let alone appreciate.
This is another Rwanda or Kosovo and the pols seem to be talking as if this revolves around partisan politics and can be decided from within that context. It should not be; however people decide to view this situation.
Sadly, American politicians make it about them and not about the situation in another part of the world.
“[Obama] knows he already possesses [authority]) to take military action against the Assad regime in response to crimes against humanity.” You acknowledge that you keep pointing this out, so I have to ask…
…on what basis do you believe he has that authority? A well-known Constitutional lawyer once said, oh about 6 years ago, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
And of course, aside from US law (and even if Congress approves), a US attack on Syria would be a violation of international law. Whatever the nobility of our motives, it would have to be acknowledged that the violation of “international norms” which we seek to punish would be thus punished, well…in violation of international norms.
In our lifetimes the UN will be dissolved and reconstituted in a more durable form.
I had to smile at Putin’s exclamations of illegality. What international hotspots has Russia (or the Soviet Union before) not engaged itself in militaristically? I can only think of the Falklands War. Especially rich given the way Putin pummeled the independent Republic of Georgia.
If one were to follow Putin’s rationalizations, the French (and British) and Turks would be well within their rights to attack Syria, however, without UN Security Council approval.
Putin has now said that he is asking for some actual proof in the UN, and he’ll support the US.
That doesn’t seem like an insane request. So far, all I’ve seen that has been given are administration assertions of the existence of some amorphous rumored proofs and a dearth of actual hard specifics. Given that, Putin’s request seems eminently reasonable.
However, it puts forth a interesting question: Is this an actual cave on his previous position, or a taunt?
If Putin knows the truth (and he’s certainly in a better position to know than we or the UN ever will be) and that truth ran against Obama, then its a taunt calling him out to present lies as truth on the world stage, further embarrassing our President.
However, if the truth favors Obama, Putin might be offering a gracious opening to build actual consensus for strikes, and Obama would look foolish to decline.
Either way, I’m going to go ahead and say it’s a smart move from Vlad. He’s offering to go along with air-strikes if we “convince” him. Even if it’s a ploy (and it very well might be) don’t we have the obligation to try and offer this proof at the UN and press Russia?
Link with source:
http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-putin-russia-syria-strike-un-20130904,0,5355559.story
Andrew Sullivan on McCain:
McCain’s response, as always, is to jump into the fight with guns blazing and undertake a grueling mission for regime change. Let him make that case if he wants – it is as coherent as it is quite mad. It’s as mad as picking a former half-term delusional governor as his vice-president. There is a reason he lost the election to Obama. So why is Obama now ceding foreign policy to this hot-headed buffoon?
And this as well from Sullivan (who is about as close as I can find to my political views):
The obsession with the Middle East is increasingly a deranged one. Taking it upon ourselves to ensure that international norms of decency are enforced in that hell-hole is an act of both hubris and delusion. We can wish democrats and secularists well. But we can control nothing of their struggle, as the last few years have definitively shown. And when we try, we create as many problems as we may solve. Look at Libya.
Wow; that’s a myopic view of the world. They ain’t like us, let’em rot in their hell, huh?
I choose to believe that we have – in our personal lives, our communities, our nation, and our world, the responsibility to leave our planet in a better place than when we found it. That means tackling issues large and small with persistence, thoughtfulness and empathy. There is nothing easy in life. Life is about commitment – to people as well as to ideals. That is neither hubris nor delusion.
Do they WANT our help, Mark? Who specifically do you think we are helping?
How many innocent people are you willing to see killed to try and achieve your lofty goal?
Why don’t we do what Sweden has done and offer asylum to any Syrian who wants to come to the U.S.? That would be a far better approach to helping people than bombing their country and hoping the dictator-of-the-month has some sort of epiphany and becomes a kind soul.
There are things that can be done and things that should be done. Knowing the difference is what saves lives.
And if our actions in any way aid or strengthen Al Queda, is that a benefit or just the price you pay to demonstrate compassion?
Sweden is doing what it can.
We have other options available.
100,000 people have been killed in Syria and 4 million displaced (and those numbers are more likely to double than not). You are quibbling that some numbers more will possibly be killed through US military action.
I think forceful regime change sends a powerful message to regimes. The way to get Assad to go is to show him that fleeing is a better course of action than murdering his people.
It seems more likely that offering an alternative to Al Queda is more likely to diminish the group’s support within Syria. That is a fallacy thrown out by the isolationists that by confronting Assad we are working with Al Queda.
Sure, Mark, the responsibility to leave the planet a better place is something we all can agree with. But does the “we” (as in “we have…the responsibility”) apply to all humankind, and therefore to all national governments around the world? I would imagine that you and I would agree that it would, especially insofar as you extend the question from our personal lives to our nation and our world. So the question is, when acting on a responsibility one believes one has that involves the use of weapons in another land (and not involving a situation of direct national defense), would you grant any nation the right to unilaterally undertake such an exercise of their perceived responsibility? Or would the implications of that undermine the purpose of leaving the world a better place than one found it?
Each of the examples you cite has its right and proper area of responsibility; the individual within the individual’s community and the people he/she comes in contact with, directly or indirectly; the community or town within the town and its environs; the nation within the nation and as a respectful member of the community of nations; and the world’s nations, through international institutions such as the UN, on a global scale.
I’m not sure any other major world powers have been as respectful a member of the community of nations as has the United States.
Even if we were to remove the Assad regime from power that would still be true.
The thing in international affairs that I cannot stomach is when we support brutally repressive regimes just out of convenience and because it is easier not to get involved in other peoples’ problems. That is when we fail ourselves as a nation. We did far too much of that in the 1960s-80s. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait finally woke us up to the greater dangers of that cynical complacency.
The anecdotal evidence from Congressmen is that American sentiment against authorizing an attack on Syria are running more than 10-1. One journalist: “An undeclared senator’s office tells me calls have run roughly 1200-7 against intervention in Syria.” A congressman yesterday made a similar claim with the numbers being 500-2 against any action.
This isn’t just war weariness or isolationism… it is “What are we going to do that will actually make a difference that improves Syria for the longterm?” Obama has to demonstrate either a) a clear and present danger to the U.S. or b) a solid case that bombings will work to improve conditions there. If he can’t do that, we should not do anything with our military. Find other solutions,.
It’s more complicated than that, Mark. If Saddam’s Kuwait invasion “woke us up,” then I assume you mean that we woke up to the fact that having supported Saddam’s brutally repressive regime simply because it was fighting a nation we had more of a beef with (Iran) was not a good thing. Well, I’d agree. But I don’t think you’re suggesting we should instead have supported (and by support I mean several billion dollars worth of economic aid, the sale of dual-use technology, weaponry through secondary sources, military intelligence, Special Ops training, which is what Iraq got from us) the also-repressive Iranian regime. So what was our “responsibility” in that case, to go back to your earlier post?
Yes, to say that by “confronting Assad we are working with Al Queda” is indeed a simplistic fallacy, as you point out. But it is equally a fallacy to say that by choosing not to pick sides in a Sunni-Shia civil war in Syria we are “supporting a brutally repressive regime.” No one is suggesting providing Assad with support in the way that we once supported Saddam, or those other examples from the 1960s-80s to which you were referring. And to say that merely failing to achieve “forceful regime change” equates to “support” of Assad, well, that would be like saying that the proper course of action back in those pre-Kuwait Saddam days would have been to arm Iran, otherwise we would still be “supporting” Saddam.
I love the piece that was just run on WIS. It was coverage with interviews with US Senators and Representatives. All talked about how the correspondence they’re getting from their constituency is 90%+ to stay out of Syria and against any air strikes. Then they cut to Dianne Feinstein who says, “Yes, it’s overwhelmingly against any actions against Syria but they don’t know what I know”. So what she’s saying is the people who voted her into office say “No”, and she being the good Obama lap dog is saying , “I don’t care what you say, I’m voting Yes”.
I wish there were age limits to serving in office, we don’t need these 80-somethings who have one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel running this country. Most could care less about the long-term because they’re statistically likely be dead within a handful of years.
I respect that certain intelligence has to be classified. I get it. However, there’s got to be a middle ground between full disclosure of all facts, and our elected representatives saying “I know something you don’t know.”
I don’t know what that middle ground is, but there has to be something better. What if we knew what they knew, but still wouldn’t agree with them? It’s tough to hold the elected officials accountable in such a situation.
Democracy is messy. So is a republic.
We have to judge representatives based on the totality of their performance, not just one or two votes based on classified info. That’s how electoral accountability works, or should work.
This pretty much says it all
https://sphotos-b-atl.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/1236872_579281928774345_1361340437_n.jpg
That’s actually not how Pearl Harbor is spelled.
Ask Burl. He works right in the middle of it.
That’s all you got from that, a spelling error?
Actually, either spelling is acceptable. Maybe the source of the photo is English and therefore apt to use harbour instead of harbor.
Nope. You spell a name the way the inhabitants do when using their language. It is not Colombia, SC in English, either.
By Kathryn’s logic we should be calling it “Wai Nomi”…
Like Germany? Or Switzerland?
No, Silence and Mark, in English, the English-speaking inhabitants call my town Columbia.
In German, German speakers call their homeland Deutschland. The English name is Germany. Cologne, in German, is Koeln to its German speaking inhabitants. English speakers are free to use the English term.
This is related to the copy editor rule that groups should be called by whatever name they prefer. Hence, the Lady Gamecocks, not the Gamehens.
My God, how much botox has John Kerry had recently? He’s on television and his face from the corners of his mouth up to the top of his head doesn’t move when he talks. His skin is looking as smooth as a baby’s butt though. A couple more treatments and he’ll look like Kenny Rogers.
Kinda makes one more sympathetic for Kenny Rogers to be remotely compared to John Kerry.