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President Barack Obama praised an agreement reached Saturday between the U.S. and Russia, saying it offers a chance to destroy Syria's huge stockpile of chemical weapons and promises to end the threat the weapons pose to the region and the world as well as the Syrian people. Obama said in a statement Saturday that the international community expects Syria to "live up to its public commitments" to hand over its chemical weapons stockpile. Warning that the U.S. "remains prepared to act" if Syria falls short, he also cautions that more work remains even after the progress the deal represents. ~~snip...

[The Clown] declared that the United States is still prepared to act militarily to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons despite the decision to pursue a diplomatic deal and not strike Syria over its alleged use of chemical weapons. He also acknowledged that his approach to the Syria crisis has been uneven, but defended it... Obama spoke in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” taped Friday before the United States and Russia agreed on a plan to bring Syrian chemical weapons under international control in order to avoid military strikes.

(CNN) -- A Syrian minister declared "victory" for his country on Sunday, thanking Russia for orchestrating a chemical weapons deal to avert U.S. military action, Russia's state-run news agency RIA Novosti reported. "We welcome these agreements. On the one hand, they will help Syrians come out of the crisis, and on the other hand, they prevented the war against Syria by having removed a pretext for those who wanted to unleash it," National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar was quoted as saying. He called the deal an achievement of Russian diplomacy, and "a victory for Syria won thanks to our Russian...

A top House Democrat and Republican differed Sunday about how the United States' effort to solve the Syria crisis swerved from a threat of military force to a possible diplomatic solution, but they agreed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is now leading the effort. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., argued that a potential diplomatic solution couldn’t have been possible without President Obama first saying the U.S. would take military action against Syrian President Bashar Assad for an Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that killed nearly 1,500 of his own people. “We wouldn’t be at this point if not for the...

CNN’s State of the Union host Candy Crowley asked Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) if the U.S. really cared whether Russia had the diplomatic edge in the deal over Syrian chemical weapons, which provides a framework for the destruction or removal of them over the next year. Rogers explained the deal was a “Russian plan for Russian interests” before Crowley cut over him with her question Sunday. Rogers replied that it was serious because the U.S. had given away the credibility of its military force by allowing Russia to take the lead in the region. “The Syria plan has been...

Syrian minister calls chemical weapons deal a Russian-won 'victory' over U.S. 10:09am EDT MOSCOW (Reuters) - Syria's Minister for National Reconciliation said on Sunday that the chemical weapons agreement between Russia and the United States was a "victory" for Damascus, won by its Russian allies, and had taken away the pretext for war. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called on Saturday in Geneva on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to account for his chemical weapons within a week. The deal may avert U.S. military strikes. "This agreement, an achievement of Russian diplomats and the...

Firstly let us take a look at the "evidence" Obama and Kerry were peddling. For a start, John Kerry makes his mark under Peter's Principle as a failed Presidential candidate. As a diplomat and statesman, as US Secretary of State, he is either an incompetent jackass or else he is a barefaced, blatant liar, either case rendering him totally unfit for the job. One of the photos he was waving around as evidence to incriminate President Al-Assad was taken in Iraq in 2003.

"We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked," Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously said during the Cuban missile crisis. Barack Obama has been doing a lot of blinking lately. On Syria especially. "There would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movements on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons," he said back in August 2012. Chemical weapons were a "red line." Presumably the president hoped that his statement would deter Bashar Assad's embattled regime from using chemical weapons. And presumably he hoped that his demand in 2011 for Assad to relinquish...

And while the old canards are rolled out, the president will try and force a shutdown of the government for which they will blame the Republicans in an attempt to get the MSM back in its grove of loving POTUS and hating the Speaker. He has to bump headlines like this one from Friday’s Times: “Listing Demands, Assad Uses Crisis to His Advantage.” To repeat: Again and again and again, the House has to pass bills that it points to while demanding that the Senate act on the same subject matter and proceed to the conference where the bills are...

It’s a sad day for the United States when the president of any other country, but especially Russia, can outmaneuver our president and successfully claim the moral high ground on anything. But that’s exactly what happened thanks to President Obama's feckless “foreign policy by gaffe” – if you can even it call it policy – toward Syria in recent weeks. But in the course of seizing that high ground, Vladimir Putin got a couple of things wrong. He wrote a column in The New York Times Wednesday that concluded, “My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by...

Give to President Putin the Nobel Peace Prize Mr. Obama was given in 2009. Whereas Mr. Obama made a sincere commitment to starting a war with Syria, engaging our military in unwanted conflict, and doing so without the support of his people we resolve that Mr. Obama should deliver the Nobel Peace prize given to him in 2009 to a man of Peace, the President of Russia, Mr. Putin. Where as Mr. Putin enabled the United States to avoid an unwanted and unwarranted military action he has brought us to the "brink" of peace.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Vice President Joe Biden is heading into the belly of Democrats' anti-war opposition, venturing into a politically influential heartland state for the first time since President Barack Obama publicly endorsed a possible military strike on Syria. Biden is scheduled to headline a fundraiser in Iowa Sunday for Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, an annual steak picnic for the senator who is popular with anti-war Democrats. Even if Biden sidesteps talk of Syria, the issue will be as much a part of the backdrop as the bales of hay and smoke from the grilling steaks, and in a...

As if it didn’t have enough problems on its hands, the U.S. now finds itself in a debate over one of the unchallenged notions of U.S. national consciousness. The argument was set off by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who clearly knows what buttons to press to quickly get Americans riled up. Button number one is American “exceptionalism, the notion that the U.S., based on its values and history, occupies a unique place in the world.

Al-Qaida's leader on Friday marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by calling on Muslims to strike inside the United States, with big attacks or small, using any opportunity they can to "bleed" America financially. In an audio message released two days after the 12th anniversary of the attacks, Ayman al-Zawahri said America is not a "mythic power" and that the mujahedeen - Islamic holy warriors - can defeat it with attacks "on its own soil." Al-Zawahri, the successor to Osama bin Laden, used the anniversary to argue that the United States can be defeated by targeting its...

Lebanese daily says 20 trucks crossed into Iraq last week, bearing equipment and material used for manufacturing chemical weapons. Syria has moved 20 trucks worth of equipment and material used for the manufacturing of chemical weapons into neighboring Iraq, the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal reported on Sunday. The newspaper reported that the trucks crossed the boundary separating Syria with Iraq over the course of Thursday and Friday. Border guards did not inspect the contents of the trucks, which raises suspicions that they contained illicit cargo, according to Al-Mustaqbal.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials say the CIA has been delivering light machine guns and other small arms to Syrian rebels for several weeks, following President Barack Obama’s decision to arm the rebels. The agency has also arranged for the Syrian opposition to receive anti-tank weaponry like rocket-propelled grenades through a third party, presumably one of the Gulf countries that has been arming the rebels, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and two former intelligence officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the classified program publicly.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri has told the Islamist militants who are some of Syria's toughest opposition forces to avoid alliances with other rebel fighters backed by Gulf Arab states and the West. His comment reflects a deepening rift between groups of the Western- and Arab-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and guerrillas sympathetic to Zawahri's ultra hardline network, which seeks to wage a transnational armed campaign against the West

AMERICA’S WAR-HORSE HARLOTSStoop, Romans, Stoop,And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's bloodUp to the elbows, and besmear our swords;Then walk we forth, even to the market-place,And waving our red weapons o'er our heads,Let's all cry, "Peace, freedom, and liberty !"                            Julius Caesar, Act III, i According to experts if you really, really want to get rid of a neighbor—“bump off” is the professional term—call the mafia. But if you’re a down-at-the-heels fast fading super power, broke and bewildered, and need to continue the Arab Spring fairy tale about having the Arabs choose America-friendly democracies that sprout like orange groves throughout the Middle...

China doesn’t have the same record of killing foreign enemies overseas that Russia does. But it has a large enough overseas network and piles of cash that it could get the job done if it needed to. Just ask Naw Kham what happened after the Mekong River Massacre. The bodies of the Chinese, the crew of two cargo boats, were found badly mutilated on the Thai side of the river in early October 2011. The killings, the worst slaughter of Chinese citizens abroad in recent memory, angered the Chinese public. Chinese investigators insist that Mr. Naw Kham was the mastermind...

The first eight-plus months of 2013 have convinced us of one thing: Rand Paul acts and the rest of the potential 2016 Republican presidential field reacts. On drones, Paul led a 13-hour-long filibuster that drew Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (among others) to the floor in support. On Syria, Paul was out front in his opposition to a military strike — a position that 30 of his Senate Republican colleagues shared as of this writing. Those 30 include both Rubio,who voted against the use-of-force resolution in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. ... Below are our rankings...