"Most striking paragraph of the week on Syria: the superb Charlie Savage on the front page of the New York Times today. After pointing out that the proposed Syrian attack seems to have a familiar look to it (i.e. Reagan in Grenada, Clinton in Kosovo, Obama in Libya), he suggests that it’s anything but. Here’s the paragraph: “On another level, the proposed strike is unlike anything that has come before — an attack inside the territory of a sovereign country, without its consent, without a self-defense rationale and without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council or even the participation of a multilateral treaty alliance like NATO, and for the purpose of punishing an alleged war crime that has already occurred rather than preventing an imminent disaster.” In fact, I listened to UN Ambassador Samantha Powers this morning on NPR as she pushed the planned strike’s virtues and she didn’t even make the faintest attempt, when asked, to put even a veneer of “legality” of any sort over it, which was, I thought, startling." Tom nytimes/2013/09/09/world/middleeast/obama-tests-limits-of-power-in-syrian-conflict.html
Posted on: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:21:11 +0000
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