Leaks to The New York Times...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
in an article published Wednesday reveal one thing for certain that was previously unknown: President Barack Obama
...I am not a dictator!
's national security team is not at all happy with his handling of the Syria crisis. A top-secret letter meant for the eyes of the president, and yet obtained by the Times, makes Secretary of State John F.
I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a
lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
look "prophetic" in the words of its authors. The June letter was characterized as a warning that the repeated use of chemical weapons would be a "green light for continued use" if gone unpunished.
The president shocked the world by going to the US Congress for authorization for the use of force in Syria after building up forces in the eastern Mediterranean, the White House said that a heated debate among his national security advisers was quickly followed by unanimous support for the president's choice.
But such support does not lead to the types of leaks that made the October 22 Times piece. The article is a product of dissatisfied presidential aides and confidants choosing to speak. Officials are choosing to provide journalists with that top-secret letter and with anecdotes of the president quibbling. That may well be the majority of his National Security Council: Those who wanted to avoid military action were forced to mobilize and to publicly justify an action they did not actually endorse.
On the other end, those who fought for punitive strikes against Bashir al-Assad's forces missed out serendipitously, after a slip of the tongue by Kerry led to historic policy and a Nobel peace prize for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
Kerry was most burned by the sequence of events that unfolded throughout late August and into September. Given the way their boss has been cast, it seems likely that a significant number of these leaks originated from the State Department.