Quote:
Originally Posted by djchameleon
No, it's not going to improve.
What kind of sucks though is that Obama is leaving it up to Congress to decide whether we go in or not. I don't feel like Obama is skilled enough to get the supporters to back it in congress behind the scenes. Also there are international allies that also feel that military action should be done but they just say it behind closed doors. They don't want to openly come out and say they support it. They just want the US to go ahead and do what the US does and when/if things go wrong they can just sit on the sidelines and say "phew we are so glad that we didn't openly back them and it's great that they can take all the hate for this."
I know people just love to hate Obama for every little thing but he makes some good points.
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Not a bad speech. A few thoughts:
1. I actually like that he is taking it to congress for approval. What's too bad is that he felt the need to clarify that he would be within his rights to initiate the attack without congress if he wanted to. It's as if he's trying to juggle giving a nod to the ideals he used to endorse as a candidate while simultaneously justifying his betrayal of those ideals in the past as president.
2. I'm not buying the whole 'threat to our allies' argument. The fact is, the entire situation is a threat to Israel. It's looking like a no-win situation for them just like us. There's nothing to be done about that. But I don't think Assad is very likely to attack Israel or Turkey or any other US ally.
You could make the argument that terrorists might get their hands on the weapons and use them (as Obama did mention), but I guess I'm just unaware of how a missle strike would help prevent that and not really willing to take Obama's word for it that it would.
3. When he was making the statement about what other kind of international norms we're going to allow regimes to ignore, including regimes developing nukes, I couldn't help but think he was hinting at Iran, which was ironic since we look the other way for Israel, Pakistan, India... and we do nothing about North Korea.
It sounds like a powerful statement to say are we the kind of country to sit by and watch this horrible **** happen, but that's exactly what we do. The world police mentality is an unrealistic way of dealing with geopolitics and inevitably falls back on selective displays of symbolic justice.