By David T. Jones on September 25, 2013
Washington, DC - When someone throws a drowning man a life line, he grabs it--and doesn’t worry whether it is firmly attached at the other end. Putin tossed such a rope to President Obama with his proposal to arrange international control of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons (CW) stockpile; the lifeline was accompanied by a sanctimonious op-ed in the New York Times.
It is not that Putin’s op-ed platitudes were entirely wrong, e.g., noting the United Nations as sanctioning agent for any military action other than self defense, but that he blithely ignored the many Moscow maneuvers to prevent UN collective action on Syria.
