[lbo-talk] Diplomatic word salad

[Marv Gandall]

"The best case for Syria and for the credibility of the United States would be one in which the president upholds the operational relevance and directive nature of his August 2011 step-aside language and permits the interagency national security system to go back to the drawing board in creating options for his consideration. The worst case would be one that continues to permit the strategic communicators to broadcast the inadmissibility of what is happening in Syria, but coupling that message with operational inaction justified by excuses ranging from someone else's civil war, to the purported failure of mass murder to achieve the definition of genocide, to the all-or-nothing argument that anything with a military dimension amounts or leads to the invasion and occupation of Syria."

Frederic C. Hof
Special Advisor to Obama administration on the transition in Syria

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/syria-three-years-and-counting