Never have Americ💫ans seen what Barack Obama gave us Tue🌌sday night: a presidential address that required no equal time for an opposing view because the president’s logic rebuts itself.
For at the heart of Obama’s speech is a fundamental contradiction: If Bashar al-Assad’s chemical attack is the affront to the civilized world the president says it is, how can the response be something his secretary of state promises will be “unbelievably smal🍌l”? At h𒈔ome, the president gets away with this sort of thing because the media won’t call him on it. Dictators do.
Hence the utter incoherence. On the one h🍒and, Obama asks what kind of world we will have — and what🔥 kind of message we send to al Qaeda — if a leader can gas women and children and get away with it. On the other, he postpones action on the grounds of a vague, unrealistic bid by Assad’s patron, Vladimir Putin, to put Syria’s chemical weapons in international hands. What’s Plan B if that doesn’t work out? Don’t ask: There’s still no Plan A.
Throughout this mess, The Post has made clear we support a serious strike on Syria that would take away Assad’s ability to continue his murderous ways. In theory,✅ the president left the use of such force on the table.
In practice, having lost the support ofꦑ the American people, the Congress and our most reliable friends in the international community, Obama has greatly limited his options ൩to resort to force — and the whole world knows.
When the White House announced this speech, the th൩ought was the president would use his bully pulpit to prod a skeptical Congress to back him in a military strike on a defiant butch𝄹er. By now we should have learned.
What the president did last night is the same thing he did when he laid down his red line: Issue a threat of tough action tomorrow to avoid having to take any real acti🔥on today.