Obama's Royal Hullabaloo

Sometimes outraged, other times restrained: For weeks, the drums of war have been beating on the Potomac, the river that separates the White House from the Pentagon. Then an unscripted utterance by Secretary of State John Kerry plunged the Obama administration into a real hullabaloo. Kerry really should have been professional enough to know that irony and sarcasm have no place in the diplomat’s toolbox. He used a stentorian tone in making a purely rhetorical peace offering to the Assad regime, and Russia’s savvy Foreign Minister Lavrov promptly took the bait in order to offer it up to the Syrians on a silver serving tray. The deal would involve the piecemeal surrender of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal to the United Nations and would permit Damascus to run out the clock playing a cat-and-mouse game. It’s precisely the sort of strategy Washington wanted to prevent.

The White House crisis team’s nerves are raw. The orchestrated public relations offensive complete with shock videos, serial interviews and presidential speeches — augmented by background music provided by Hillary Clinton — threatens to go to waste. Obama’s crisis management is a fiasco. The compromise may shield him from an embarrassing electoral defeat, but he will lose face nonetheless.