Barack Obama plainly stated today without reservations or conditions that if armed intervention against the regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad isn’t taken, it was never his credibility that was “on the line,” but the credibility of the United States Congress, the American people and the entire planet that has been lost, as reported by both ABC News and CNS on Sept. 4, 2013.
Speaking at a press conference in Sweden today with the country’s prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, Obama was queried about his ever-evolving “red line” ultimatum to Syria’s President Assad’s possible use of chemical weapons in the west Asian nation’s two-year-old civil war.
Without giving specifics, Obama responded:
First of all, I didn’t set a ‘red line,’ the world set a red line. The world set a red line when governments representing 98 percent of the world’s population said the use of chemical weapons are abhorrent and passed a treaty forbidding their use even when countries are engaged in war. Congress set a red line when it ratified that treaty.
Obama also stated:
My credibility is not on the line. The international community’s credibility is on the line. And America’s and Congress’s credibility is on the line.
Regarding chemical weapons and any proverbial red lines they may cross, Obama stated on Aug. 20, 2012 as reported by the New York Times: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole buncha weapons moving around or being utilized.”
What We Agreed to and When…
The victorious allies of post-World War I enacted the Geneva Protocol, which outlawed the use of various poison gases by the signatories, but the United States never constitutionally agreed and made binding the Protocol until the administration of Republican Gerald R. Ford in 1975.
Syria, however, has never been a participant in the Geneva Protocol or any other binding international treaty outlawing the use of chemical weapons.
