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More Candor With Goldberg
Earlier this year, though, Obama was bragging to his informal biographer, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, about having thwarted planning for open war on Syria, even though that required disregarding the advice of virtually all his foreign-policy advisers.
One gem fished out by Goldberg was Obama's admission that DNI Clapper had warned him in late August (a week before he went to St. Petersburg and a month before his U.N. speech) that the evidence pinning blame on Damascus for the sarin attack was hardly airtight.
Goldberg wrote that Clapper interrupted the President's morning intelligence briefing "to make clear that the intelligence on Syria's use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a 'slam dunk.'" Clapper chose his words carefully, echoing the language that CIA Director George Tenet used to falsely assure President George W. Bush that the case could be made to convince the American people that Iraq was hiding WMDs.
Even though Obama continued to dissemble and the mainstream U.S. news media has continued to treat Syria's "guilt" in the sarin attack as "flat fact," the neocons did not get their war on Syria. I describe an unusually up-front-and-personal experience of their chagrin under the subtitle "Morose at CNN" in "How War on Syria Lost Its Way."
Nor did neocon disappointment subside in subsequent years. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has remained among the most outspoken critics of Obama's decision to cancel the attack on Syria in 2013.
On Dec. 3, 2014, Corker complained that, while the U.S. military was poised to launch a "very targeted, very brief" operation against the Syrian government for using chemical weapons, Obama called off the attack at the last minute.
Corker's criticism was scathing: "I think the worst moment in U.S. foreign policy since I've been here, as far as signaling to the world where we were as a nation, was August a year ago when we had a 10-hour operation that was getting ready to take place in Syria but it didn't happen. ... In essence and -- I'm sorry to be slightly rhetorical -- we jumped in Putin's lap."
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