White House: If Assad only destroys some of his chemical weapons, that's fine with us

Not that it's a big surprise, but let it be known beyond a shadow of a doubt: Barack Obama will not do anything to prevent evil and/or insane men from threatening others. The fact that he may have said he would, even in a specific situation, is completely irrelevant.

Some of us understood this before he even took office, simply from what you could observe about his nature. He has little regard for the notion of the United States as a force against global evil, and he just plain has better things to do. So when he declared two years ago that he was establishing a red line that Bashar Assad had better not cross with respect to chemical weapons, no one really thought he meant it, did they? Assad sure as hell didn't. And when Assad pushed the envelope and Obama was in danger of looking like a fool for not following through on his threat, he had no choice but to defer to good friend of the U.S. Vladimir Putin and go along with the charade in which everyone would pretend Assad was giving up his weapons. Fox News now reports on exactly how big a charade it truly is. Supposedly Assad had agreed to the complete destruction of 12 chemical weapons production facilities. Ha! Now his position is that seven of them can be destroyed, but as far as the other five are concerned, well, that will require "further negotiation over how that will take place, and the White House is haplessly going along with this:

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Even while the chemicals—or at least those the Assad regime has official owned up to -- were handed over in time, their destruction did not meet the deadline, and the demolition is likely to continue for months more. On July 7, for example, the destruction began of some 600 tons of Syrian chemicals aboard a U.S. cargo ship in the Mediterranean; the Pentagon said the process might take about 60 days. Other facilities in Finland working on chemicals destruction had eliminated 11 tons of materials by June 26 but might take 150 days to accomplish their remaining work, according to an OPCW report. Additionally, as Mikulak pointed out, “Syria has failed to engender international confidence that its declaration [of its chemical stockpile] is fully accurate and complete,” and, as he concluded, “the specter of CW use by the Assad regime continues to threaten the Syrian people.”

Once the threat of U.S. military action was removed - not that it was ever real to begin with - it was inevitable that this whole weapon-destruction deal would devolve into an endless series of dodges. Why should Assad really do what Obama wants? Putin believes it's in his interests to protect Assad, and he's certainly not going to impose any consequences on him for anything whatsoever. The long and short of it is that Obama ran his mouth, had no intention of backing up his words with action, and needed to be bailed out by Putin under terms favorable to Putin and Assad. Obama has no will to stand up to any bad actor on the global stage. I'd venture to say it annoys him that people expect him to. Bashar Assad picked a very fortunate point in history to try his hand as a sadistic monster.