Two from VDH. First, a quote from his interview with Hugh Hewitt on the radio:
“He wants to use force, but he doesn’t quite want to use force. It’s going to be substantial, but not very substantial. He really thinks it’s important to consult Congress, but he wasn’t going to do it. But then when he got in trouble, he was going to do it, and then when they were going to vote no against him, he postponed it. He really believes you always have to do it, but of course, he didn’t do it in Libya. And the winner of everything is Vladimir Putin. I mean, he’s Machiavelli. He’s absolutely, in a diabolical way, brilliant, because suddenly, a man with no aircraft carrier group, no Nobel Prize, no big economy, no democracy, is the moral superior to the President. He’s posing as a man who stopped a rash and immature Obama from killing people and breaking stuff.”
And here’s Victor’s comments today about Putin:
A Bare-Chested Machiavelli
It is unfortunate that Vladimir Putin could not use his formidable diplomatic skills at home to address his own near failing state rather than showcasing them abroad at our expense. Oh, well . . .Without much effort, his Alice-in-Wonderland proposal of collecting WMD from Assad, in the midst of a civil war no less (does this mean a mandatory 24-hour time-out so that U.N. inspectors can rush in with clipboards and audit the ten warring sides?), all at once seems to have kept his Mediterranean coastal client Bashar Assad not just alive, but with the upper hand in the war just by — in theory, though unlikely in fact — eliminating 1 percent of the combined killing capacity so far demonstrated in the fighting.
Putin, the leveler of Grozny, and absolutely callous to the first 99,000 killed in Syria, has advertised to the world his humanitarian empathy in preventing an American-led, new escalation of the war, supposedly to be waged over the last 1,000 dead.
