Obama Struggles Over Syria

Michael Scherer: “The problem of Syria may be showing the limit of [Obama’s] instinct. He wants to launch military strikes in retribution for the death of some innocent children and not others. He wants Congress to approve his action even though he may still act alone. He wants to maintain a war footing even as a new diplomatic solution appears on the horizon. They are all intellectually defensible positions. But it may just be that the people who tuned in Tuesday night, between the first and second hours of So You Think You Can Dance, were looking for a President to lead the country, not a man hoping to reason with it.”

John Harris: “Two weeks of zig-zag foreign policy by President Barack Obama — marching to war one moment, clinging desperately to diplomacy the next — culminated Tuesday night, appropriately enough, in a zig-zag address to the nation that did little to clarify what will come next in the Syria crisis but shined a glaring hot light on the debate in the president’s own mind.”