Speech Fail

It’s been a few days since the speech to end all…claims that the president is a great orator. This is part II to Wednesday's post, giving background. So, what exactly did the president say in the portentous 9/11-eve speech?

In the fifteen-minutes it took to read, he referred to himself (I or me; I didn’t include we) on average twice a minute. Near the beginning, he used words intended to pull in the military-supporting conservatives, using angles possibly provided him by Speaker Boehner. He used the one significant reason for taking action: use of biological weapons is against the rules of war, and must be punished, or others will be more likely to use them.

9/10/2013 Speech on Syria

 

In the first couple of days following the August 21 attack, I could feel the pull of that argument as well, and the word from the White House was that they “knew” without doubt that Assad had done it. But, because he has undermined his credibility so thoroughly since we’ve come to know him on the public stage, when rumors of other possibilities came out, it was easy to doubt that assessment.

During the speech, the president did spend a few words to support the claim of Assad’s guilt:

We know the Assad regime was responsible. In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gasmasks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighborhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces. Shortly after those rockets landed, the gas spread, and hospitals filled with the dying and the wounded. We know senior figures in Assad’s military machine reviewed the results of the attack, and the regime increased their shelling of the same neighborhoods in the days that followed. We’ve also studied samples of blood and hair from people at the site that tested positive for sarin.

Not bad, as evidence goes. Some of it only verifies there was a deadly gas attack. But some pointed clearly to the Assad regime. So why, during the extra week he had to build up public support, did this evidence not get included in every story? Can we trust these claims, without supporting evidence from additional sources (British or Israeli intel, for example), coming from our lying president?

The president did a not-bad job of reiterating the Bush policy of pre-emption:

If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons. As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield. And it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and to use them to attack civilians.

He voices the arguments against a Syrian strike, and attempts to discount them:

·         It could put us on a slippery slope to another war.

·         Not worth doing a small strike that doesn’t take out Assad.

·         It will increase danger of retaliation.

·         Why get involved in complicated situation where we have no interest?

·         Why do we have to be the world’s policeman?

His dismissals were not particularly effective, but at least they were attempted. Mostly they amount to, "These are of no concern to me."

The odd thing about the speech was that, up till this point he has built up the reason for taking action, including the assertion that all avenues of diplomacy and political pressure had already failed. Having led us to this point, he finishes with this all-other-options-have-been-tried-and-failed paragraph:

I have a deeply held preference for peaceful solutions. Over the last two years, my administration has tried diplomacy and sanctions, warning and negotiations—but chemical weapons were still used by the Assad regime.

Logically, then, the next section should be encouraging Congress to authorize the use of force. That's what the speech was scheduled to do. But—surprise!

The Russian government has indicated a willingness to join with the international community in pushing Assad to give up his chemical weapons. The Assad regime has now admitted that it has these weapons, and even said they’d join the Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits their use.

What a great idea! Why didn’t we think of that? After all, inspections worked so well in Iraq during the 1990s. Oh, if only we’d had Russia involved in diplomacy before! And who better to safeguard these dangerous weapons if/when Syria turns them over? (I'm assuming you can hear irony as you read this. Also expect the spin to be that it was our threat that brought about this new diplomatic possibility.)

There’s something about the Chemical Weapons* Convention that caught my attention—that Syria would “join.” So I looked it up. The CWC became effective in 1997, when 65 states (nations) had ratified the agreement. Currently 189 countries have signed on. Only five UN recognized states have not: Angola, North Korea, Egypt, South Sudan, and Syria. The use of chemical weapons was the “red line” that the president said in 2012 would “change his calculus” toward Syria, and that last week he claimed was the not his, but the world’s red line. The CWC makes it a red line for the countries that agreed with it; the other countries presumably don’t think chemical weapons are too savage for use even in war—so anyone tangling with those countries, beware. Syria did not break a treaty by using chemical weapons on its own people; it never said it wouldn’t use them. And so far (that we know of) it hasn’t used them beyond its own borders.

Without question the use of chemical weapons in Syria is abominable—I would use the word savage—but it was not a broken agreement. Many other savage acts have gone on in Syria as well; one of the rebels recently ate the heart of an enemy, with video boldly posted for the world to see. So you’ve got savages fighting savages. Do we punish for 1000 deaths by chemical weapons, but ignore 100,000 deaths because regular rockets were used? Is it our job to decide what and whom to punish?

There are no good political actors in Syria. We have no apparent national interest there. Good people can disagree on whether we should hold accountable anyone who uses chemical weapons, regardless of their promises. But the president failed at every level, either to convince us of the wisdom of taking action, or to convince us the reasoning behind his sudden new plan not to take action.

What was the speech for? He said it was to explain “why [Syria] matters, and where we go from here.” We heard what we already knew, that chemical weapons are bad. We did not learn why Syria matters to us as Americans. And we did not learn what we are going to do. But we can count on our president to dither.

Here is a plan I would suggest: let the savages within Syria knock each other out. But make a path for getting innocent refugees the heck out of there. They would have to realize they will need to adopt the freedom cultures of any nation they move to, and assimilate themselves into their new country. This could be the best possible outcome for Christians living in Syria, as well as any others who would prefer freedom to whatever brand of tyranny has reigned there for so long.

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*I used the term "biological weapons" in my last post; I have been thinking of them as the same: weapons used to kill mainly innocents through illness. But there is probably a difference. There are chemicals used this way, and there are biological infectious materials that could be weaponized. A distinction possibly worth noting. I don't see anything in the description of the CWC to include biological weapons separate from chemical weapons, and I had thought the use of both was considered against the rules of war, but I may be unaware of a separate agreement for biological weapons specifically.

We Remember



There are a number of images from 9/11 that I find moving. I wrote about one of my favorites, a painting called “Out of the Ashes,” for my 9-11-2011 post. Another is the one of the planting of the US flag.

image source

 

Because of last year’s 9/11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, we probably need to add some images from 9-11-2012. I like this one:

 

image source

This 9/11 the president purposely brought to our attention the threat of Islamic extremists by scheduling a vote on a Syria strike for this date, and as a prelude to that vote scheduling a speech to persuade the American people to go along with him.

The delay of a week, to consult Congress, was puzzling. I’m guessing (with not a lot of ability to read this sort of mind) that the president thought time would allow him to build up more public support for a strike—on account of the sheer force of his personality or something. But the more people looked at the situation, the more opposition there was to a strike. Certainty that Assad was behind the attack was shaken. More suspicion was raised about this administration’s surreptitious help of the rebels—which include the anti-freedom Muslim Brotherhood (whom this administration calls “moderate”) and al Qaeda, the very source of the 9/11/2001 attack on American soil.

There’s an odd form of brinksmanship going on lately. The president was going to attack swiftly, without going to Congress, as announced by his Secretary of State way back in the first days after the gas attack in Syria. But later that same day he contradicted Kerry by announcing that he was going to Congress. He didn’t ask for an immediate vote to respond to the recent action in Syria; he decided to let legislators finish their summer break of townhall meetings in their home districts, and come back on the historic and portentous 9/11 date. (Technically, he could only suggest the date; it was up to Harry Reid and John Boehner to schedule the votes.) And then, in the speech, he ended up requesting that Congress not vote to strike.

Before we get to the talk, I thought it might be helpful, on this day of remembering, to go through some of what we still recall. Dots, not necessarily connected, but maybe: 

·        Saddam Hussein used biological weapons against the Kurds—citizens in his own country—in 1988, well before the Gulf War. At the time of the ceasefire of the war to free Kuwait from Iraqi invasion, Saddam admitted to having these weapons, as well as a list of other weapons he was required to destroy (including efforts to develop nuclear capabilities). The ceasefire was not an end to the war, but simply a temporary ceasing of attack on a dictator who was severely overpowered militarily, allowing the surrender of weapons. This was to be verified by UN inspectors. Saddam Hussein refused to produce the weapons or supply evidence of their destruction; nor did he allow inspections of specified facilities, and eventually he ousted the UN inspectors entirely. He suffered numerous UN sanctions, essentially saying, “Hey, you’re not supposed to do that.” But without the resumption of force, he simply thumbed his nose at the authorities.

·        After 9/11/2001, the immediate need was to retaliate against the Al-Qaeda-sponsoring Taliban in Afghanistan. Secondary was the looming, continuing threat of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We still had a list, from the ceasefire of the Gulf War, of the weapons he admitted to having. And he’d had an additional decade to build up more weapons, without the scrutiny of inspectors. There were at those times photos online (and therefore I can’t be certain of their veracity) of satellite photos from earlier in the 2001 of an Al-Qaeda training location (Salman Pak, I believe) in Iraq that included a 707 fuselage. Along with intel from our own sources and a number of trusted allies, who have yet to deny the veracity of their intel, there was evidence that Iraq was intending and attempting to increase WMDs, both biological and materials for a nuclear program. It’s possible, and many believe, the existence of WMDs was a ruse by Hussein to boost his image of power. But was it safe to assume all the intel was wrong? Along with the history, was the evidence enough to qualify as a “grave and gathering threat”? [That was the phrase used in Collin Powell’s address to Congress, not “imminent threat,” which seems to have become part of the collective memory. Bush, in his 2003 SOTU address specifically said Iraq was not an imminent threat and must not be allowed to become one.] I believed so then, and I still do. Majorities of the public above 60%, and large majorities in Congress and the Senate also agreed, as well as some 40 other nations who joined with us in the world-protecting action.

·        In the months during which preparations were made for invading Iraq, there were reports of mobile biological weapons facilities (possibly in trailers, some of which were eventually found, empty) as well as missiles, being moved toward the Syrian border. When the known WMDs did not turn up after the invasion, that transport to Syria seems a much more believable explanation than that all of the world’s intelligence agencies and Saddam Hussein’s own inventory were wrong.

·        Following the 9/11/2012 attack on the Benghazi embassy, the president lied to the American people, blaming an obscure anti-Islam video—clinging to that line weeks after we all knew it was a terrorist attack. A year later, there is still very little truth forthcoming from the administration (which asks, “What difference does it make?”) We don’t know why requests for added security were not heeded. We don’t know why Ambassador Stevens was asked by SOS Hillary Clinton to meet with some mysterious actors, possibly related to the attackers, in the dangerous Benghazi area on the dangerous anniversary of 9/11. We don’t know why rescue efforts were ordered to stand down. Shortly after the event, and continuing since, are rumors that the deal was to facilitate under-the-table arming of Al-Qaeda-affiliated Syrian rebels.

·        On the anniversary of the Benghazi attack, the president had wanted the Congress to red-light his attack on Syria’s regime, harming Assad and helping the Al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels.

If this were a novel, the clues would add up to the president betraying his own people, with some nefarious scheme—a scheme that, if all the details were to become known, would very likely be prosecutable as treason. That would make exciting reading. But in our real, beloved America, such a president still seems unthinkable.

I do not like suffering through this president’s speeches. The condescending tone and twisting of truth are like fingernails on a chalkboard. But I was curious about what he could say under these circumstances, so I gave in and both listened and read the transcript Tuesday evening.

That speech was, if nothing else, proof positive that “the great orator” is a misnomer, even with a teleprompter. But it does reveal some things we should know—whether they are what the president wanted us to learn or not.

So in the next post we’ll go over what he said, and possibly also what the words mean—because what he says and what he means are not necessarily equivalent.