Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Why the New Syria Plan Won't Work Either

In order to obviate an attack on a country that Americans evidently care about not at all, Vladimir Putin, working in concert with President Barack Obama and his intermittently slap-happy secretary of state, has come up with a fake solution to a real problem.

September 10, 2013 at 1:47 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that the U.S. might postpone a military strike on Syria if the regime put its chemical weapons under international supervision -- an offer that both Russia and Syria quickly warmed to.

So, in order to obviate an attack on a country that Americans evidently care about not at all, Vladimir Putin, the State Department's new Syria desk officer, working in concert with President Barack Obama and his intermittently slap-happy secretary of state, has come up with a fake solution to a real problem.