It's clear to me that President Obama has boxed himself in. He doesn't really want to go to war with Syria so he's looking for a way out, or at least to get plenty of buy-in for the blame. If he can get Congress to agree then he will feel safe saying, "this is what the American people wanted and agreed on".
But there's another exit strategy, and I keep waiting for it to re-appear. We can't just recycle the old excuse and blame the Syrian problem on a movie, but maybe a book would work. Maybe Salmon Rushdie's latest tome incited the violence; it made someone so mad they just couldn't think straight. But of course they calmed right down after seeing the carnage they caused with the chemical weapons, killing a whopping thousand or so compared to the mere one hundred thousand killed by projectiles, explosives, and edged weapons. (Those apparently don't really count.)
And they're really, really sorry, and they'd love to stop but the other side won't, so they have to keep fighting in order to survive.
It's not their fault.
It's Rushdie's. Or whomever's. Maybe mine. They could easily find all the proof they needed in the vast treasure trove of all the data the NSA (and DEA!) mined this year.
I could live with that. I'll just get a deal like Snowden and "flee the country" and "request asylum" and live happily ever after far, far away.
Do I really believe all this? Nah. But if they take the bait and I disappear to, say, Kosovo, I won't mind a bit. I'm pretty sure Kosovo is the code name for Honolulu.
Aloha!
