On Tuesday, I went to vote at the local elementary school a few hours before President Obama spoke to the country about Syria, and on my way out I remembered that September 11, 2001, fell on another New York primary day—one that had to be cancelled before it was a few hours old. Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty began amid the open wounds of the terror strikes, stretched across twelve years of inconclusive wars, and now it’s coming to an end with a debate about another war.

The White House had announced the speech a couple of days before John Kerry accidentally breathed life into a diplomatic initiative with Russia, and by the time Obama turned onto the red carpet leading to the cameras in the East Room, his objective had already been compromised. That’s been the case from the beginning of the Administration’s march to limited strikes: everything crumbles from half-heartedness before it can harden into action. The speech was written as a piece of persuasion, an effort to get the country and the Congress behind the President in standing up for Syria’s children and international norms. So Obama took on the doubts and the questions one at a time. What’s so special about chemical weapons? Why does this matter to American security? What if this turns into a quagmire? Why does it always have to be us?

He answered those questions in his respectful, reasonable way, and although I don’t think he made the case for national security, which has become the sine qua non, the mere act of taking seriously the skeptical letters of his fellow-citizens distinguished Obama dramatically from his predecessor. When he talked about ideals and principles—sounding, for the first time in his Presidency, like his new Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power—Obama seemed to feel that those words meant something. Yet somehow it didn’t matter. The country won’t be persuaded. The case wasn’t made. The vote is already lost.

And Obama had already moved away from his own cause even as he spoke. Kerry’s slip about Syria avoiding a military strike by turning over its chemical weapons and the instant Russian response had taken the pressure off; you could hear all of Washington (other than the local office of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces) breathe a sigh of relief. White Houses don’t do this sort of thing, but the speech probably should have been cancelled, because it no longer served any purpose. The President spoke to the nation because he said he would, just as he prepared for military action because he said he would.

So the Administration has had the good fortune to stumble into diplomacy, randomly sprung from the trap it set for itself. I’d say the chances of missile strikes are now less than one in ten. The sudden turn of events has already led the Syrian government to reverse its longstanding policy of denying that it possesses chemical weapons, a situation that would have Monty Python-like possibilities if not for the daily horrors. That move suggests the better possibilities of diplomacy.

There are two problems with the diplomatic channel. The first is practical: What would it take for the blue helmets and white S.U.V.s of the United Nations to wade into the Syrian battlefields, take over Assad’s vast arsenal of poison gases, and eliminate them? They’ve reportedly been dispersed to more than forty sites. There’s a brutal and chaotic war going on. The United Nations would evacuate its advisers from Syria if a single one of them were killed, something that Assad or his extremist enemies could easily arrange. Armed factions will be trying to grab control of the weapons the whole time. Assad will have every incentive to withhold some part of his arsenal in case of ultimate need, and he’ll have a friend on the Security Council to help him delay and deceive. (For a sense of Assad’s potential as a reliable partner in his own disarmament, watch him answer Charlie Rose’s questions.) Finally, diplomacy will bind Obama to Putin and Assad in a way that the much riskier path of supporting elements of the Syrian rebellion would not. And, as I wrote in this week’s magazine, the political solution that the White House keeps talking about seems impossible without taking that very risk.

This leads to the second problem with the diplomatic initiative: even if the plan works, Syria will be no closer to the fall of Assad or to his negotiated departure. The killing will go on. Death by gas might be taken off the table, but children and other human beings, by the thousands, will still be pulverized in indiscriminate shelling and burned to death by incendiary devices. There will be more to celebrate in Washington and at the United Nations than in Homs and Aleppo.

In the strange period since August 21st, when the poison-gas attacks took place, the White House has seemed incapable of strategic thinking. The State Department seems incapable of coherent communication. Republicans who never raised a question about Iraq are now in full flight from the use of force because they don’t like the Commander-in-Chief. The United Nations can’t bring itself to condemn chemical weapons regardless of who’s using them. Assad’s war crime has turned into Obama’s embarrassment. Everything is upside down; nothing seems to be working as it should.

On Monday, the Times released results of a poll on Syria. Nearly two-thirds of Americans don’t think the United States should involve itself in solving foreign conflicts. For better or worse, we’ve decided that someone else should do this. “We’re pretty good at destroying regimes, but we’re not very good at setting up nations,” a sixty-nine-year-old Virginian named Anne Walsh told the pollsters. “We cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force,” Obama told the country. That is the legacy of these past twelve years.

Photograph by Evan Vucci/Pool/AP.

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