Susan Rice and other former top Obama administration officials are back in the headlines for the wrong reasons, as it seems is always the case. Even as the world recoils in horror at another chemical weapons attack by all credible accounts perpetrated by the Bashr al-Assad’s Syrian regime– and even as most of the world cheers on President Trump’s effort to set Assad straight — Obama administration underlings are busy on Twitter and friendly cable news shows attempting to fend off any detractors of the former President’s “red line” policy on Syria.
Young Ben Rhodes, who continues to pop his head out of his hole like a balding gopher any time anyone dear speak ill will of his fearless leader, continues to struggle to rewrite history 140 characters at a time. But the echo chamber just isn’t what it used to be, especially when more photos of dead pale children spill out all over social media.
Former Obama dude-bro Dan Pfeiffer willed up the temerity to suggest that Obama’s inaction in Syria was even courageous. “There is always massive momentum for a military strike” Pfeiffer tweeted, “being the brake takes more courage and strength than being the accelerator”
Because nothing projects courage like fleeing to the wilds of Alaska with a selfie stick while Syrian kids are washing up on beaches.
This latest chemical weapons attack must have come to great shock to former Secretary of State John Kerry, who in 2014 stated in an interview. “we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out” of Syria. “Three months after that, the President’s threat of force had made it possible cut the deal that got 100 percent of the declared chemical weapons out of Syria.” Oops, I guess. This was followed up with a tweet on June 23rd, 2014 from the official State Department Twitter account quoting Kerry as saying, “Today, the last 8% of declared chemical weapons were removed from Syria. Great work done by all involved.”
Yes, take a bow everyone.
Defenders of Kerry are stating the word “declared” in that statement to mean Assad must have been hiding stockpiles from both the US and United Nations inspectors (except the State Department tweet quoting Kerry never said the word declared). Now that can be reported to have been a lie as well. As reported in the New York Times, Obama administration officials knew that in fact Assad had not relinquished all of his chemical stockpiles, per Kerry’s claim.
Former Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken is quoted saying “We always knew we had not gotten everything, that the Syrians had not been fully forthcoming their declaration.” This revelation resulted in Politifact revising Kerry’s claim, which they rated as “true” at the time.
It’s a stunning admission that craters the narrative of Obama’s successful soft power diplomacy, as well as shattering any claims by Rice or Kerry that this latest attack is a result of either new stockpiles or hidden stockpiles. If the State Department and National Security Council under Obama knew Assad was harboring more deadly chemical weapons, why was the UN not notified? Where was our brave truth telling media, now completely re-energized by Tom Hanks’ espresso machine and new found sense of duty? Why is the public, now, almost three years later being told by former Obama officials they they knew all along but told the American people “100 percent” of weapons were out of Syria?
In the words of Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power, have they no shame? The only thing missing from Obama and Kerry’s comments is an aircraft carrier (or yacht) and a giant banner in the background.
Which brings us back to Susan Rice, who is always somehow magically at the center of these foreign policy whirlwinds and may now have more to answer for to Congress than just matters of political unmasking. In another blow to Rice’s shaky credibility, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler has revisited Rice’s own claim on Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile.
In an NPR interview from just this past January, she told Morning Edition, “We were able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never accomplished.” Rice continued, “We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”
Kessler reports:
“But almost a year before Rice made those comments, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper had told Congress that Syria had continued to use chemical weapons, such as chlorine, against it’s own people”.
Kessler also goes on to remind of Obama’s own statement at the time:
“Today we mark an important achievement in our ongoing effort to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction by eliminating Syria’s declared chemical stockpile.”
Kessler rated Rice’s claim four “Pinocchios”, stating:
“The Obama administration had a tendency to oversell what was accomplished, perhaps because Obama received so much criticism for not following through on an attack if Syria crossed what Obama had called ‘a red line'”
Once again, the claims by Blinken in the New York Times seem to shatter any former Obama Administration official claim that they were only speaking about weapon stockpiles they knew about.
And now the same former administration officials who are telling their detractors this latest attack is a result of weapons they simply didn’t know about (they did) continues to prop up Obama’s Iran deal as a model of successful diplomacy. This is the same administration who bragged about a misinformation campaign to sell Obama’s Iran deal–just the kind of deal Obama needed to make his grandiose presidential library worth the ticket to Chicago.
These are the same high ranking officials who told the American people to trust the Iranian regime enough to not only allow them to operate nuclear centrifuges, but also to cash a $150 billion check. These are the same officials who have been reassuring us that the world’s leading state sponsor of terror would keep their word on a deal that Congress was not a part of and could not even view. This factor should give the Trump Administration pause.
It’s only a matter of time before they are forced to not only deal with the fallout of Obama’s inaction and deception on Syria, but now possibly his dissembling regarding Iran as well. But on the plus side, the Obama Library Foreign Policy Wing will be a state of the art architectural marvel praised by a media who somehow looked away prior to this great golden age of truth-telling and fact checking.
Mission Accomplished.
