Puttin' on the Ritz.

words.

 "...One of the main problems with proposed American military action in Syria is Washington’s inability thus far to control its message internationally. The minute Obama began proposing strikes in response to the use of chemical weapons, much of the world’s news coverage, not to mention the political blame game abroad, shifted from Assad’s culpability to the prospect of U.S. “aggression.” And somewhere there, in limbo, it remains.

There are a good number of people in the world who still believe that Syria is telling the truth with its denials of using chemical weapons, and that the United States is simply lying about what it knows. This is a real problem for Obama, and one that must be tackled head on.

The disconnect is eloquent testimony to the degree to which the U.S. has undermined its own credibility in the wake of the false W.M.D. claims made in the run-up to the war against Saddam Hussein a decade ago. In the succeeding years, it has become a globally shared perception that the U.S. had other reasons to invade Iraq—that it has never come clean about its real motivations. With the ongoing N.S.A. revelations in the air, there is a sense that the United States is an all-seeing, all-knowing power, determined to preserve its hegemony.

...If, on the other hand, Putin and Assad’s other backers cannot be prevailed upon to bring him around—and, sadly, it seems unlikely that they will—then what we will have instead in Syria is a larger and more dangerous war, with unforeseeable consequences. The U.N. announced this week that a third of Syria’s population is now displaced by the war, with two million refugees calculated to have fled to neighboring countries, especially Jordan and Lebanon. It has become, officially, the worst refugee crisis in the world. That’s a reality that no state of denial or conspiracy theory can erase."

THE NEW YORKER: Putin and the Syria Conspiracy-Theory Problem