Washington
Vladimir Putin, who keeps Edward Snowden on a leash and lets members of a riotous girl band rot in jail, has thrown President Barack Obama a lifeline.
The Russian president had coldly brushed back Obama on Snowden and Syria, and only last week called John Kerry a liar.
Now, when it is clear Obama can't convince Congress, the American public, his own wife, the world, Liz Cheney or even Donald Rumsfeld to bomb Syria, Putin rides to the rescue, offering him a face-saving way out.
If it were a movie, we'd know it was a trick. We can't trust the soulless Putin or the heartless Bashar Assad. By Tuesday, Putin was already setting conditions.
Just as Obama and Kerry were bragging it was their military threat that led to the breakthrough, Putin moved to neuter them, saying they'd have to drop their military threat before any deal.
Amateur hour started when Obama dithered on Syria and failed to explain the stakes there. It escalated in August 2012 with a slip about "a red line for us" — which Obama and Kerry later tried to blur as the world's red line, except the world was averting its eyes.
Obama's ambivalent leadership led him to the place he never wanted to be: unilateral instead of unified. He had not done the groundwork to line up support.
The bumbling approach climaxed with two off-the-cuff remarks by Kerry, hitting a rough patch in the role of a lifetime, during a London press conference Monday; he offered to forgo an attack if Assad turned over "every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community" and promised, if they did strike, that it would be an "unbelievably small" effort.
A State Department spokeswoman walked back Kerry's first slip, but once the White House realized it was the only emergency exit sign around, Kerry walked back the walking back, claiming at a congressional hearing Tuesday that he did not "misspeak."
The president countered Kerry's second slip with NBC's Savannah Guthrie on Monday night, declaring that "The U.S. does not do pinpricks," which Kerry parroted at the hearing Tuesday. Obama, in his address Tuesday night, made sure the world knew: "The United States military doesn't do pinpricks."
Where the mindlessly certain W. adopted a fig leaf of diplomacy to use force in Iraq, the mindfully uncertain Obama is adopting a fig leaf of force to use diplomacy in Syria.
Obama cried over the children of Newtown, Conn. He is stricken, as he said Tuesday, by "images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor" from "poison gas." He thought that avenging the gassing was the right thing to do.
While most Americans shudder at the news that 400 children have been killed by a monster, they recoil at the Middle East now; they've had it with Shiites vs. Sunnis, with Alawites and all the ancient hatreds.
Kerry can bluster that "we're not waiting for long" for Assad to cough up the weapons, but it will be hard for him to back it up, given that a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll indicates that Joe Sixpack is now a peacenik.
W., Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld launched a social engineering scheme to change the mindset in the Middle East about democracy and the mindset at home about the post-Vietnam reluctance to be muscular about imposing our values through war.
In a crouch after 9/11, the country was happy to punish an Arab villain, even the wrong one. That mass delusion, plus the economic vertigo, has sent us into a permanent crouch. That's too bad.
Maureen Dowd writes for The New York Times.