West of Eden: Update

The Times leads:

The White House insisted Monday that it would not be thrown off its cautious approach to Syria, despite Israeli military strikes near Damascus and new questions about the use of chemical weapons in the civil war there.

Booman thinks the paper is actually gunning for war, with Bill Keller's abominable column ("Syria is not Iraq"—well, whoop-de-doo, and it's not New Jersey either, Sparky, is it? I guess you could say every country is unique in its own way, or better still, you could shut up) yesterday and now this story. (Per Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice it's just blowback from their being bored with Afghanistan. Also it's not just the Times.)

It's certainly a very curiously constructed opening sentence. Are they suggesting it would have been less newsworthy if the White House were inspired by these to become less cautious???

Reuters via Al Jazeera.

This is pretty hard to take, but I think we need to appreciate Obama's discipline, when he is using any means necessary, including those verging on the unscrupulous, to avoid military stupidity: when the pressure becomes just immense. As on the subject of Iran (where he doesn't mind a rather cruel strategy of extremely harsh sanctions as long as war itself is averted), Libya (where there was a non-stupid approach available), Yemen and Somalia (where as bad as the drone campaign looks it is nevertheless a minimizing of how bad it might be).

Because clearly some kind of intervention in Syria, though unlikely in the extreme to save even a single life, is clearly deeply desired by a lot of people. Not that they've finally noticed how many people are being killed. I imagine there must be some kind of Syrian Chalabi  (the new prime minister-in-exile Ghassan Hitto, conveniently domiciled in Texas from 1980 until recently?) making the cocktail rounds in Georgetown. Or the Syrian Support Group?

Officially formed in the spring of 2012 by a group of Syrian expatriates living in the U.S. and Canada, the SSG has acted as a conduit for information between Syria's Supreme Military Council, which commands the rebel armies, and outside governments ever since the U.S. severed diplomatic ties with Syria in February of 2012. It has also been raising money from private donors to support the Syrian rebels and lobbying Congress and the Obama administration to send military assistance to the fighters.

Syrian expatriates such as executive director Brian Sayers and  media relations director Dan Layman. Huh.