That old UN magic

Barack Obama fancies himself some kind of a deliverer and he has indeed delivered us. He has delivered us into a parallel universe. In this parallel universe the prince of peace serves as the president of the United States and argues in favor of a simulacrum of war. He disparages the United Nations as a fount of meaningless twaddle. Circumventing the United Nations can be a matter of high principle because the structure of the United Nations produces “paralysis.” What is “required” will not be “produced through Security Council action.” This prince of peace is also a situational ethical kind of guy.

If the prince of peace weren’t pounding the drums for, ah, finely calibrated military action, we would already have “moved on,” as they used to say (and as the prince of peace says below). He most assuredly would not have blundered into the truth. This he believes, until he doesn’t:

Frankly, if we weren’t talking about the need for an international response right now, this wouldn’t be what everybody would be asking about. You know, there would be some resolutions that were being proffered in the United Nations and the usual hocus pocus, but the world and the country would have moved on. So trying to impart a sense of urgency about this, why we can’t have an environment in which over time, people start thinking this we can get away with chemical weapons use–it’s a hard sell, but it’s something I believe in.

The full video and transcript of the St. Petersburg G20 press conference include this statement of the (apparently attenuated) interest of the United States in the action contemplated: “The national security of the United States, requires that when there’s a bre[a]ch this brazen of a norm this important, and the international community is paralyzed and frozen and doesn’t act, then that norm begins to unravel. And if that norm unravels, then other norms and prohibitions start unraveling. And that makes for a more dangerous world. And that, then, requires even more difficult choices and more difficult responses in the future.” It probably reads better in the original Greek.

Video via Daniel Halper/Weekly Standard.

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