Would Congress defy Obama? Would Obama defy Congress? Would Assad get away with defying world opinion? At this point Kerry was asked by a reporter in London if there was any way Assad could avoid an American missile strike. In response, Kerry sounded a lot tougher than the U.S. was looking just then. “Sure,” said Kerry. “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week—turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting.” Not that Assad ever would. “He isn’t about to do it,” Kerry went on, “and it can’t be done.”
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Cynicism ran wild. The New Republic said what it thought in a headline: “The Syria Solution: Obama Got Played by Putin and Assad.” The kicker to the headline—”Amateur Hour.” Said the National Review, an “apparent gaffe” [apparent is one of our sturdiest weasel words] by Kerry that White House “spinmasters” were retailing as “crafty statesmanship” was now “official U.S. policy.” The magazine didn’t believe that for a second.
Kerry’s seemingly off-hand suggestion on Monday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad might avert a U.S. military strike if he surrendered all of his chemical weapons offered a potential escape hatch that no one had seriously proposed before—and that could end up leading nowhere.
At any rate, weasel words aren’t taught in journalism schools, yet no reporter uncomfortable with them can be said to have mastered his craft. In Monday’s New York Times I came across a reminiscence of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—which was a real crisis, a crisis in which more was at stake than a president’s dignity (and therefore a crisis that is still written about half a century later, rather than forgotten by Thanksgiving). Said the Times, JFK “avoided disaster, Dean Acheson later observed, by ‘plain dumb luck.’”
