Question from the press: How small will it be?
Answer from the U.S. Secretary of State: At least as small as my understanding of foreign policy and nearly as small as my and the president’s cojones.
The above exchange is fictional — but not by much.
The Secretary of State’s actual answer to the question of how much force the U.S. would use against Syria in the event of a military strike was an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”
The Times UK (subscription required) reports that Kerry is in London, on the last leg of a mini-tour of Europe to press the case for military intervention. Evidently an unstated purpose of his European visit is to assure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that the U.S. is totally unserious in its announced goal of punishing the regime for its purported use of chemical weapons on rebel forces.
Inside sources indicate that Kerry was originally planning on announcing the U.S. surrender to Syrian forces until aides pointed out to him that we had not yet attacked and that talk of surrender was “premature.”
Not everyone is laughing at Kerry’s buffoonish behavior. Politico reports that Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a supporter of a strike on Syria, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”:
I don’t understand what he means by that. I don’t think describing the size or effort of what our target sets are or what ship fires what missile is in our national security interest, candidly. And again, this is part of the problem. That’s a very confusing message — certainly a confusing message to me that he would offer that as somebody who believes this is in our national security interest.
Conservative pundit Bill Kristol was also on the program and expressed concern that “the administration has done such a bad job of making its case.”
Assad, who was interviewed by PBS’s Charlie Rose (the broadcast will air at 9 p.m. tonight), threatened retaliation in the event of a strike on his country. Rose appeared on on “Face the Nation” on Sunday to promote the interview, where he noted that Assad “would not talk about any kind of the nature of the response.”
Maybe when all is said and done, Assad can give Kerry remedial lessons on how to do his job.
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