J'accuse

Photo by EPA via Time.

There's something I have to say about this horrible gas attack in Syria that I wish somebody else would say instead, but nobody else seems to be noticing this one detail, when the Trump administration denounces the Obama administration as responsible for the horror, as Spicer, reported in this piece by Anne Barnard and Michael Gordon:

 “these heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the last administration’s weakness and irresolution.”

“President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a ‘a red line’ against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing,” Mr. Spicer said.

It's that Obama did do something—it's not a secret, and I've written about it from the start—at least after it became clear that Congress wasn't going to give him an authorization for a military assault on Syria in August-September 2013: the US and Russian administrations, working together, created a plan through which the Assad regime would destroy its chemical weapons stores, and stop, at least, this especially upsetting method of murdering Syrian people at bulk rates, so that Obama's Red Line would not have been crossed for nothing.

West of Eden: Dissent in the State Department

12th-century Ayyubid Syrian baluster pottery jars in the Raqqa style, via Christies.

I more or less support President Obama's Syria policy as it is (with a reservation I'll get to below), but there's something I want to say about its critics, including the 50-odd US diplomats who have been circulating the internal cable that was leaked to the WSJ and the Times for today's papers,

urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

I want to say that I may disagree with them, they're not bad people. I mean, some of the critics are bad people (hi, Senator McCain, hi, Ron Fournier), whose aims are not to help the suffering people of Syria, about whom they understand nothing, but to further their own misbegotten careers by picking at the president's perceived weakness in any way they can, to make themselves look larger, but some of them, possibly most, are good people responding to a terrible situation in a totally understandable way. (Including candidate Hillary Clinton, who I think is at least somewhat on the State rebels' side.)

Milestones in shamelessness: Addendum

London protestor in Blair mask, maybe 2010? Photo by DPA, via Der Spiegel.

One more vampire called out by the current crisis in Iraq is former British prime minister Tony Blair, literally arguing that you can't blame the crisis on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, because the instability in Iraq is a direct consequence of the war in Syria:

In a defence of his actions in Iraq, Blair attacked as "extraordinary" any notion the country would be stable if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power.

"The civil war in Syria with its attendant disintegration is having its predictable and malign effect. Iraq is now in mortal danger. The whole of the Middle East is under threat."...

Universal deniability

Q: Why did dey tell de crocodile to consult a psychotherapist?
A: Because he was in de Nile.

From Openwaterpedia.

The Times's Richard J. Oppel concern-trolls Willard Mitt Romney a bit (technically, it's a news story, as you can tell in the print edition by the flush right margin—in the online Times everything is ragged right, which means that officially you can't tell the difference between news and analysis; I just noticed this for the first time and I find it strangely unnerving, [jump]