Foggy Bottom Breakdown

You know what's a really bad habit for a Secretary of State to have? Thinking out loud:

"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 a full and total accounting," Kerry told reporters during a press conference in London with his British counterpart.

The State Department later walked Kerry's statement back, calling it an off-hand "rhetorical argument."

The "He" in qustion is Bashar Assad, of course, the chin-challenged hereditary dictator of Syria. And Assad's patrons think that Kerry's rumination is brilliant. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, jumped on it right away:

"We call on the Syrian leadership not only agree on a statement of storage of chemical weapons under international control, but also its subsequent destruction, as well as about the full accession to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons," Lavrov said in a statement to reporters.

"We will immediately join the work with Damascus if establishing international control over chemical weapons in that country helps prevent attacks," Lavrov continued.

Kerry, for his part, issued this statement:

Of course, the harp seals are now telling us that this was all part of the master plan:

It turns out that all of the people on the left and right who were fooled by the pundits and hosts on cable news into believing that war was just around the corner were absolutely, completely, totally, utterly wrong. War is not around the corner. In fact, President Obama had a strategy to get Syria to the table. That strategy was to get the United States talking about striking Syria by asking Congress for authorization.

If President Obama wanted to strike Syria, he could have done so at any time. He didn’t, because military action in Syria was not what he wanted. The president wanted Syria to surrender their chemical weapons to the international community, and the best way to get Russia to listen was to turn up the heat by letting Congress debate a potential military strike on Syria.

He's a genius! Or is he? A contrary view from Professor Reynolds:

Meanwhile, at home, polls show Americans are against a strike, and Obama is facing double-digit defections among Democrats in the Senate. The outlook for passage in the House, meanwhile, looks so bad that a resolution to authorize war may not even make it to a vote. If it's sure to fail, why force members -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- to go on record? You can bet they don't appreciate Obama putting them in this position. The Pentagon isn't happy, and even The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, a reliable Obama supporter, calls his policy "dumb."

Some critics are even comparing the collapse of American influence under Obama to the end of the Soviet Union. Well, that may be an exaggeration -- but Obama promised a "fundamental transformation," after all.

At least Hollywood is still behind the president -- or, anyway, is mostly keeping quiet about its opposition because, as old-line Hollywood liberal Ed Asner reports, they "don't want to feel anti-black." So it's come to this -- while George W. Bush was savaged for "bombing brown people," now if you're against bombing brown people you're "anti-black."

You have to ask yourself -- if Obama really thought that getting the "international community" in charge of Syrian chemical weapons was the right approach, why would have done the things that Reynolds catalogs? Playing your friends that way isn't politically smart, especially if you have three years to go in your administration.