Carbon Delirium: Shooting Up on Big Energy

By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch

02 April 14

f all the preposterous, irresponsible headlines that have appeared on the front page of the New York Times in recent years, few have exceeded the inanity of this one from early March: “U.S. Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin.” The article by normally reliable reporters Coral Davenport and Steven Erlanger suggested that, by sending our surplus natural gas to Europe and Ukraine in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the United States could help reduce the region’s heavy reliance on Russian gas and thereby stiffen its resistance to Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior.

Forget that the United States currently lacks a capacity to export LNG to Europe, and will not be able to do so on a significant scale until the 2020s. Forget that Ukraine lacks any LNG receiving facilities and is unlikely to acquire any, as its only coastline is on the Black Sea, in areas dominated by Russian speakers with loyalties to Moscow. Forget as well that any future U.S. exports will be funneled into the international marketplace, and so will favor sales to Asia where gas prices are 50% higher than in Europe. Just focus on the article’s central reportorial flaw: it fails to identify a single reason why future American LNG exports (which could wind up anywhere) would have any influence whatsoever on the Russian president’s behavior.

The only way to understand the strangeness of this is to assume that the editors of the Times, like senior politicians in both parties, have become so intoxicated by the idea of an American surge in oil and gas production that they have lost their senses.

As domestic output of oil and gas has increased in recent years -- largely through the use of fracking to exploit hitherto impenetrable shale deposits -- many policymakers have concluded that the United States is better positioned to throw its weight around in the world. “Increasing U.S. energy supplies,” said then-presidential security adviser Tom Donilon in April 2013, “affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals.” Leaders in Congress on both sides of the aisle have voiced similar views.

The impression one gets from all this balderdash is that increased oil and gas output -- like an extra dose of testosterone -- will somehow bolster the will and confidence of American officials when confronting their foreign counterparts. One former White House official cited by Davenport and Erlanger caught the mood of the moment perfectly: “We’re engaging from a different position [with respect to Russia] because we’re a much larger energy producer.”

It should be obvious to anyone who has followed recent events in the Crimea and Ukraine that increased U.S. oil and gas output have provided White House officials with no particular advantage in their efforts to counter Putin’s aggressive moves -- and that the prospect of future U.S. gas exports to Europe is unlikely to alter his strategic calculations. It seems, however, that senior U.S. officials beguiled by the mesmerizing image of a future “Saudi America” have simply lost touch with reality.

For anyone familiar with addictive behavior, this sort of delusional thinking would be a sign of an advanced stage of fossil fuel addiction. As the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality evaporates, the addict persists in the belief that relief for all problems lies just ahead -- when, in fact, the very opposite is true.

The analogy is hardly new, of course, especially when it comes to America’s reliance on imported petroleum. “America is addicted to oil,” President George W. Bush typically declared in his 2006 State of the Union address (and he was hardly the first president to do so). Such statements have often been accompanied in the media by cartoons of Uncle Sam as a junkie, desperately injecting his next petroleum “fix.” But few analysts have carried the analogy further, exploring the ways our growing dependence on oil has generated increasingly erratic and self-destructive behavior. Yet it is becoming evident that the world’s addiction to fossil fuels has reached a point at which we should expect the judgment of senior leaders to become impaired, as seems to be happening.

The most persuasive evidence that fossil fuel addiction has reached a critical stage may be found in official U.S. data on carbon dioxide emissions. The world is now emitting one and a half times as much CO2 as it did in 1988, when James Hansen, then director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned Congress that the planet was getting warmer as a result of the “greenhouse effect,” and that human activity -- largely in the form of carbon emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels -- was almost certainly the cause.

If a reasonable concern over the fate of the planet were stronger than our reliance on fossil fuels, we would expect to see, if not a reduction in carbon emissions, then a decline at least in the rate of increase of emissions over time. Instead, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that global emissions will continue to rise at a torrid pace over the next quarter century, reaching 45.5 billion metric tons in 2040 -- more than double the amount recorded in 1998 and enough, in the view of most scientists, to turn our planet into a living hell. Though seldom recognized as such, this is the definition of addiction-induced self-destruction, writ large.

For many of us, the addiction to petroleum is embedded in our everyday lives in ways over which we exercise limited control. Because of the systematic dismantling and defunding of public transportation (along with the colossal subsidization of highways), for instance, we have become highly reliant on oil-powered vehicles, and it is very hard for most of us living outside big cities to envision a practical alternative to driving. More and more people are admittedly trying to kick this habit at an individual level by acquiring hybrid or all-electric cars, by using public transit where available, or by bicycling, but that remains a drop in the bucket. It will take a colossal future effort to reconstruct our transportation system along climate-friendly lines.

For what might be thought of as the Big Energy equivalent of the 1%, the addiction to fossils fuels is derived from the thrill of riches and power -- something that is far more difficult to resist or deconstruct. Oil is the world’s most lucrative commodity on the planet, and a source of great wealth and influence for ruling groups in the countries that produce it, notably Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. The leaders of these “petro-states” may not always benefit personally from the accumulation of oil revenues, but they certainly recognize that their capacity to govern, or even remain in power, rests on their responsiveness to entrenched energy interests and their skill in deploying the nation’s energy resources for political and strategic advantage. This is just as true for Barack Obama, who has championed the energy industry’s drive to increase domestic oil and gas output, as it is for Vladimir Putin, who has sought to boost Russia’s international clout through increased fossil fuel exports.

Top officials in these countries know better than most of us that severe climate change is coming our way, and that only a sharp reduction in carbon emissions can prevent its most destructive effects. But government and corporate officials are so wedded to fossil fuel profits -- or to the political advantages that derive from controlling oil’s flow -- that they are quite incapable of overcoming their craving for ever greater levels of production. As a result, while President Obama speaks often enough of his desire to increase the nation’s reliance on renewable energy, he has embraced an “all of the above” energy plan that is underwriting a boom in oil and gas output. The same is true for virtually every other major government figure. Obeisance is routinely paid to the need for increased green technology, but a priority continues to be placed on increases in oil, gas, and coal production. Even in 2040, according to EIA predictions, these fuels may still be supplying four-fifths of the world’s total energy supply.

This bias in favor of fossil fuels over other forms of energy -- despite all we know about climate change -- can only be viewed as a kind of carbon delirium. You can find evidence of this pathology worldwide and in myriad ways, but here are three unmistakable examples of our advanced stage of addiction.

1. The Obama administration’s decision to allow BP to resume oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

After energy giant BP (formerly British Petroleum) pleaded guilty to criminal negligence in the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which resulted in the death of 11 people and a colossal oil spill, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suspended the company’s right to acquire new drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The ban was widely viewed as a major setback for the company, which had long sought to dominate production in the Gulf’s deep waters. To regain access to the Gulf, BP sued the EPA and brought other pressures to bear on the Obama administration. Finally, on March 13th, after months of lobbying and negotiations, the agency announced that BP would be allowed to resume bidding for new leases, as long as it adhered to a list of supposedly tight restrictions

BP officials viewed the announcement as an enormous victory, allowing the company to resume a frenetic search for new oil deposits in the Gulf’s deep waters. “Today’s agreement will allow America’s largest investor to compete again for federal contracts and leases,” said BP America Chairman and President John Mingé. Observers in the oil industry predict that the company will now acquire many additional leases in the Gulf, adding to its already substantial presence there. “With this agreement, it’s realistic to expect that the Gulf of Mexico can be a key asset for BP’s operations not only for this decade but potentially for decades to come,” commented Stephen Simko, an oil specialist at Morningstar investment analysts. (Six days after the EPA announced its decision, BP bid $42 million to acquire 24 new leases in the Gulf.)

So BP’s interest is clear enough, but what is the national interest in all this? Yes, President Obama can claim that increased drilling might add a few hundred thousand barrels per day to domestic oil output, plus a few thousand new jobs. But can he really assure our children or grandchildren that, in allowing increased drilling in the Gulf, he is doing all he can to reduce the threat of climate change as he promised to do in his most recent State of the Union address? If he truly sought a simple and straightforward way to renew that pledge, this would have been a good place to start: plenty of people remember the damage inflicted by the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the indifference BP’s top officials displayed toward many of its victims, so choosing to maintain the ban on its access to new drilling leases on environmental and climate grounds would certainly have attracted public support. The fact that Obama chose not to do so suggests instead a further surrender to the power of oil and gas interests -- and to the effects of carbon delirium.

2. The Republican drive to promote construction of the Keystone XL pipeline as a response to the Ukrainian crisis

If Obama administration dreams about pressuring Putin by exporting LNG to Europe fail to pass the credibility test, a related drive by key Republicans to secure approval for the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline defies any notion of sanity. Keystone, as you may recall, is intended to carry carbon-dense, highly corrosive diluted bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Its construction has been held up by concerns that it will pose a threat to water supplies along its route and help increase global carbon dioxide emissions.

Because Keystone crosses an international boundary, its construction must receive approval not just from the State Department, but from the president himself. The Republicans and their conservative backers have long favored the pipeline as a repudiation of what they view as excessive governmental deference to environmental concerns. Now, in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, they are suddenly depicting pipeline approval as a signal of U.S. determination to resist Putin’s aggressive moves in the Crimea and Ukraine.

“Putin is playing for the long haul, cleverly exploiting every opening he sees. So must we,” wrote former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a recent Washington Post op-ed. “Authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline and championing natural gas exports would signal that we intend to do precisely that.”

Does anyone truly believe that Vladimir Putin will be influenced by a White House announcement that it will allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline? Putin’s government is already facing significant economic sanctions and other punitive moves, yet none of this has swayed him from pursuing what he appears to believe are Russia’s core interests. Why, then, would the possibility that the U.S. might acquire more of its oil from Canada and less from Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela, and other foreign suppliers even register on his consciousness?

In addition, to suggest that approving Keystone XL would somehow stiffen Obama’s resolve, inspiring him to adopt tougher measures against Moscow, is to engage in what psychologists call “magical thinking.” Were Keystone to transport any other substance than oil, the claim that its construction would somehow affect presidential decision-making or events on Russia’s borders would be laughable. So great is our reverence for petroleum, however, that we allow ourselves to believe in such miracles. This, too, is carbon delirium.

3. The Case of the Missing $20 Billion

Finally, consider the missing $20 billion in oil revenues from the Nigerian treasury. In Nigeria, where the average income is less than $2.00 per day and many millions live in extreme poverty, the disappearance of that much money is a cause for extreme concern. If used for the public good, that $20 billion might have provided basic education and health care for millions, helped alleviate the AIDS epidemic, and jump-started development in poor rural areas. But in all likelihood, much of that money has already found its way into the overseas bank accounts of well-connected Nigerian officials.

Its disappearance was first revealed in February when the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, told a parliamentary investigating committee that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had failed to transfer the proceeds from oil sales to the national treasury as required by law. Nigeria is Africa’s leading oil producer and the proceeds from its petroleum output not claimed by the NNPC’s foreign partners are supposed to wind up in the state’s coffers. With oil prices hovering at around $100 per barrel, Nigeria should theoretically be accumulating tens of billions of dollars per year from export sales. Sanusi was immediately fired by President Goodluck Jonathan for conveying the news that the NNPC has been reporting suspiciously low oil revenues to the central bank, depriving the state of vital income and threatening the stability of the nation’s currency. The only plausible explanation, he suggested, is that the company’s officials are skimming off the difference. “A substantial amount of money has gone,” he told the New York Times. “I wasn’t just talking about numbers. I showed it was a scam.”

While the magnitude of the scam may be eye-catching, its existence is hardly surprising. Ever since Nigeria began producing oil some 60 years ago, a small coterie of business and government oligarchs has controlled the allocation of petroleum revenues, using them to buy political patronage and secure their own private fortunes. The NNPC has been an especially fertile site for corruption, as its operations are largely immune from public inspection and the opportunities for swindles are mammoth. Sanusi is only one of a series of well-intentioned civil servants who have attempted to plumb the depths of the thievery. A 2012 report by former anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu reported the disappearance of a hardly less staggering $29 billion from the NNPC between 2001 and 2011.

Here, then, is another, equally egregious form of carbon delirium: addiction to illicit oil wealth so profound as to place the solvency and well-being of 175 million people at risk. President Jonathan has now promised to investigate Sanusi’s charges, but it is unlikely that any significant portion of the missing $20 billion will ever make it into Nigeria’s treasury.

Curing Addiction

These examples of carbon delirium indicate just how deeply entrenched it is in global culture. In the U.S., addiction to carbon is present at all levels of society, but the higher one rises in corporate and government circles, the more advanced the process.

Slowing the pace of climate change will only be possible once this affliction is identified, addressed, and neutralized. Overcoming individual addiction to narcotic substances is never an easy task; resisting our addiction to carbon will prove no easier. However, the sooner we recast the climate issue as a public health problem, akin to drug addiction, the sooner we will be able to fashion effective strategies for averting its worst effects. This means, for example, providing programs and incentives for those of us who seek to reduce our reliance on petroleum, and imposing penalties on those who resist such a transition or actively promote addiction to fossil fuels.

Divesting from fossil fuel stocks is certainly one way to go cold turkey. It involves sacrificing expectations of future rewards from the possession of such stocks, while depriving the fossil fuel companies of our investment funds and, by extension, our consent for their activities.

But a more far-ranging kind of carbon detoxification must come in time. As with all addictions, the first and most crucial step is to acknowledge that our addiction to fossil fuels has reached such an advanced stage as to pose a direct danger to all humanity. If we are to have any hope of averting the worst effects of climate change, we must fashion a 12-step program for universal carbon renunciation and impose penalties on those who aid and abet our continuing addiction.

Obama Vs. The Hawks

By Nina Burleigh, Rolling Stone

02 April 14

Critics have branded him weak and feckless on foreign policy, but an inside look reveals how the president faced down the war machine

n March, when Vladimir Putin announced to the world that he was helping himself to Crimea, the strategically important peninsula on the Black Sea that has been part of Ukraine for the past six decades, Washington, D.C., resounded with the all-too-familiar calls for confrontation. Sen. John McCain lamented America's inability to craft a military option for the Ukrainian crisis as "tragic" and wrote an op-ed in The New York Times attacking President Obama for making "America look weak." Other hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that Obama's "weakness" emboldened Putin. At a time when the American public is rightfully wary of foreign military entanglements, this "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to foreign policy has become familiar among the war-happy neocons who populate Washington's corridors of power. In that same op-ed, McCain went on to argue that Obama – who has already ended one war, in Iraq; is in the process of winding down another, in Afghanistan; and is proposing to slash the defense budget by billions – has failed as commander in chief. But it was the war Obama kept us out of that most bothered McCain. "Perhaps worst of all," he wrote, "Bashar al-Assad crossed President Obama's 'red line' by using chemical weapons in Syria, and nothing happened to him."

That Obama did not unilaterally launch cruise missiles into Syria late last summer, after chemical weapons were deployed against civilians, was one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency. Since then, it has been routinely characterized as a sign of Obama's timidity and the scattershot decision-making process within his foreign-policy apparatus.

But the full story of how Obama seized upon diplomacy instead of war has been largely overlooked. Here, in exclusive interviews, Rolling Stone reveals how he rebuffed members of his own National Security Council to make a call that still has Washington grumbling; subtly negotiated with Putin to get what he wanted – the removal of Syrian chemical weapons – without dropping a single bomb; and avoided directly involving America in an open-ended military confrontation.

Since civil war broke out in Syria three years ago, Obama had kept the conflict at arm's length, declining to accept wholesale the advice of some of the most experienced members of his foreign-policy team. In 2012, CIA Director David Petraeus urged him to equip and train the rebels, a strategy strongly endorsed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wary of authorizing what could be construed as an overt act of war, Obama eventually approved only a limited, covert CIA rebel-training program. "There is a piece of this president who comes from the point of view that the Iraq War was a big mistake and 'I am not going to be the president who leads us into another one of those,'" says a former administration official. "He had deep reservations about where action in Syria could lead."

But on August 21st, 2013, the world woke up to news that, according to U.S. intelligence, 1,400 Syrians in two rebel-held Damascus suburbs had been killed by sarin nerve gas, and for the next 10 days it looked like the president, who had spoken repeatedly about getting America off "permanent war footing," would have his own war.

A year before, Obama had called chemical weapons the "red line" for American involvement in the charnel house of the Syrian civil war. In foreign-policy circles, his act of going on record and staking such a rigid position had been seen as a huge mistake. "He boxed himself in," says one former Obama official. "I guarantee no adviser would ever advise the president to use a red line on anything."

With the gassing, Obama had effectively just been invited to bomb Syria and drag America into another intractable sectarian conflict in the Middle East. On August 24th, Obama called his national-security advisers to discuss the range of responses. American intelligence believed that the rockets had been fired from regime-held positions. The president's mood was somber. No matter how reluctant the American public was to get involved in another war, the consensus in the room was that the United States had to intervene. "It was pretty evident to everybody in that meeting that something significant had happened, and the president actually said, 'This is the scenario we had been worried about, the nightmare scenario of mass-casualty attack,'" says Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, adding, "The discussion turned immediately to what do we do about it."

Interventionists like National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power had been eager for action on humanitarian grounds, and the administration felt pressure to back up the red-line stance or lose credibility. "In part, the reason why they were focusing on doing something on Syria is that they felt people were pushing them," says another former White House adviser. "McCain, Lindsey Graham – it is unbelievable how influential Senator Graham was in the president's thinking. They desperately wanted Lindsey on their side. It's a fact that those two – and you have to include Joe Lieberman and Senator Kelly Ayotte – have had enormous influence on the way the White House thinks. But why? They have influence far beyond the reality of their power."

As the Cabinet and staff filed out, the question seemed not whether to act but when. "We decided that John Kerry would go out and try to shake the international community out of complacency," says Rhodes. The other worry was that after Bush's discredited attempt to prove to the world that Saddam Hussein had harbored chemical and biological weapons, no foreign leader would believe another American president making a similar claim. "Clearly, there was an Iraq dynamic," says Rhodes. "But we were going to call on the world to confront the use of chemical weapons."

Over the course of the next week, the White House gave the appearance that an attack was imminent. The president reviewed military options, considering limited cruise-missile strikes intended to punish but not remove the Syrian regime. Kerry called the gassing "a moral obscenity." Vice President Joe Biden announced there was "no doubt" Assad was behind the attacks, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel stated that "we are ready to go." Obama ordered the Pentagon to move a fifth destroyer into the eastern Mediterranean within firing range of Syria.

"He was deeply ambivalent and really not wanting to get involved," says one former White House official. "He is a conflicted man, and he gave great voice to that. But he has elevated to high positions people who take the opposite view. He was deciding about something where someone can lose their life, in a part of the world that pulls in actors with dogs in the fight. Syria has every hot button you could press."

Meanwhile, White House staffers fanned out to Capitol Hill to line up support for impending action. Only one member of the president's team seemed hesitant, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, who had long highlighted the costs and risks of intervention. "He was the lone person at the briefings who was not overly enthusiastic," said one Obama official who was present at many of the meetings.

Previous presidents have justified military action without congressional approval by getting international backing, and Obama and Kerry began working the phone, reaching out to his counterparts in Europe and the Middle East to shore up support. But while many leaders condemned the attacks, hopes of building an early coalition were dashed when British lawmakers abruptly voted against Prime Minister David Cameron's commitment to military action, distancing the U.S. from its closest ally. While French President François Hollande remained eager, German leader Angela Merkel voiced a broader European view in favor of deferring action pending results from U.N. investigators. Some members of the Arab League urged a military response, but not openly. "They didn't want to support us publicly, they just wanted us to do their bidding," says one administration official.

Though the president spent that week signaling imminent action, his remarks on the subject were careful. At a meeting with visiting heads of Baltic nations Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on August 28th, a week after the sarin attacks, Obama told reporters he was "war-weary" but determined to make the Syrian government answer for its use of chemical weapons. He said he hadn't made a final decision. But he appeared to be leaning toward an attack, with sources telling reporters the U.S. would fire cruise missiles at Syrian command targets within days. "Originally, they were talking about using a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel," says retired Brig. Gen. John Johns, a former professor at National Defense University, who had ties to Obama defense officials. "But if you start that unilaterally, you are going down the primrose path again, like Iraq."

The evening of Friday, August 30th, as war preparations dominated the news channels, the president took a walk on the South Lawn with Denis McDonough, his 44-year-old chief of staff, and discussed asking for congressional authorization. Theoretically, the Constitution requires the president to ask for legislative approval before committing to any kind of military action. But in reality, presidents don't ask and Congress has mostly acquiesced when it comes to matters of authorizing what are intended to be limited actions. "Congress is supposed to authorize force, but they are often deadbeats and say nothing and then either attack or defend the president," says Don Wallace, a Georgetown law professor and chairman of the International Law Institute, who was among a group of constitutional scholars who signed a letter urging the president to get congressional approval for Syria.

McDonough, the first aide Obama sees in the morning and the last one he sees at the end of the day, is a brush-cut, intensely disciplined man who has been called "an enforcer of the presidential will." Fellow staffers regard him as "an enigma," says one former White House official. Appointed chief of staff in January 2013, he built his career in foreign policy and had served on the White House National Security Council in the first term. He was in the Situation Room when the Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden. "Denis plays a strong role," says the former White House official. "I can't say Denis would be supportive of a strike. But Denis is more about gaming out how to protect the president's image and legacy."

The two men returned, and at around seven they summoned a team of close advisers, including Rice, Rhodes and NSC Chief of Staff Brian McKeon, all of them assuming the president would be giving the go-ahead to attack Assad. "I have an idea that I want to run by you," the president began, according to Rhodes. "In the future, we are going to have to make a lot of decisions about when to use military force in this part of the world." Obama then spoke of a questionnaire The Boston Globe had sent to presidential hopefuls in 2007, asking in what circumstances the candidates supported attacking Iran without seeking congressional authorization. "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," candidate Obama had replied.

"I still agree with that guy," he told his staff. "I feel that acting without authorization and less international legitimacy will be more controversial and less effective."

Georgetown professor Wallace, like other constitutional law experts, believes the president did the right thing for the wrong reasons, seeking political cover and trying to buy time rather than follow the letter of the law. "He did it because the British voted against force," says Wallace. "But I think he scared the Russians into believing we would use force. It's ironic that he got blasted for doing the constitutionally correct thing."

Rhodes, who was in the room for that meeting, says Obama spoke confidently and marshaled both legal and political reasons for his decision. "I would not say he spoke just as a lawyer," says Rhodes. "Only someone who had been president for several years could have been making the argument he was making. He cited previous decisions of his own. He cited the sense of the country and how public opinion needed to be better reflected in his decision-making and how he wanted to leave things for whoever comes next. I think he would have been far less likely to come to that decision in the first year of his presidency."

The next morning, a Saturday, Obama convened a contentious meeting with his top-level national-security advisers, including Kerry and Hagel. Everyone in the room, who had been on board with a strike with varying degrees of enthusiasm, now faced shelving the plan they had presented so vigorously. Rice worried he would appear to be compromising his control as commander in chief. Some thought it unlikely Congress would approve a strike, while Biden was optimistic. But White House legislative briefers had been hearing all week from "a groundswell of people on the Hill saying, 'It's not that we don't care about the gas, but that we haven't weighed all the adverse consequences,'" says a former staffer. "Most people in congressional affairs knew it was crazy that he was asking for authorization – because he wouldn't get it."

That afternoon, the president went on television to explain his decision. "This menace must be confronted," he said, denouncing Assad and making it sound like he was getting ready to unleash cruise missiles. But then he steered away from what had, until that hour, seemed to be the inevitable course of events: "While I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective."

He did not say when the vote would be held, because he couldn't. That would be up to Congress. To D.C.'s foreign-policy establishment, Obama had just delivered one of the greatest disappointments in recent years. Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf says it was "arguably the moment of greatest foreign-policy dysfunction in the United States since the decision to go into Iraq."

While the pundits ruminated and those who wanted regime change in Syria mourned a missed opportunity, Obama had another card to play. Behind the scenes, a long-tended diplomatic seed was about to bear fruit. On September 5th, Obama traveled to St. Petersburg for the G-20 Summit to marshal support for action in Syria and to sit down with Putin. Most of the mainstream media portrayed the meeting as a "showdown" between Obama and Putin, one that Obama lost. But White House staff say that when the two leaders huddled for half an hour in a much-watched tête-à-tête in a corner of the meeting room, they agreed in principle to start relieving Assad of his chemical weapons, peacefully.

That discussion did not come out of nowhere. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Obama officials had been "in deep engagement" with the Russians about them "playing a greater role" in ending the conflict in Syria, according to White House sources. The Russians make no secret of having armed Assad with conventional weapons. They are less open about the fact that they supplied Syria with the means to make chemical weapons in the 1980s.

On September 9th, Kerry stunned reporters in London when he appeared to accidentally give Assad a way out. "Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week – turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting," Kerry said, adding, "but it can't be done." The media seized on the comment as an off-message ad-lib. But behind-the-scenes discussions had been taking place for some time. What had changed was that the Russians were taking it seriously with the U.S. now on the brink of bombing Syria.

That afternoon, Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov discussed the idea further by phone, as Kerry was on a plane back to Washington. "There was more openness than we had expected," says a senior administration official, and by the time Kerry landed, consideration of the option had advanced to a more serious stage.

Days later, the U.S. team was headed to Geneva, with a plan that American experts had worked on feverishly for a few days. "We got there and the Russians were pretty much unprepared," the official recalls. "We took out the plan and went off that, and there was agreement."

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki emphasizes that the episode crystallized the administration's preference that diplomacy always be the first option. "Our view is that the Russians weren't trying to do us a favor by working with us on the chemical weapons," she says. "They have an interest in preventing chemical weapons in the region. They have an interest in Iran not developing nuclear weapons. It's not a favor to us." Psaki says that despite upheaval in Crimea, the U.S. and Russia will continue to work together on those broad shared interests in Syria.

By the end of September, the U.N. adopted an international chemical-weapons-disposal agreement, ending the need for a military strike or congressional authorization for one. In the end, Putin got the credit, but different actors, including the U.S. and the EU, had proposed some version of the same idea for a while, says Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "It's like the baby that has one mother and many claim paternity," she says. "Putin got to the paternity claim first, but lots of people had been putting that idea through channels."

Kerry dismisses any criticism that the administration has been soft in its handling of Assad or Putin. "People are entitled to their own opinions, not their own facts, and the bottom line is pretty simple," Kerry tells Rolling Stone. "We made it crystal clear Assad was going to be held accountable for using chemical weapons. Because President Obama threatened force, diplomacy had a chance to work, and we worked it. And what no one with any grasp of the facts can deny is that a diplomatic agreement to get those weapons out of Syria is the only way to guarantee those weapons can't be used again. So make no mistake, diplomacy backed by a threat of force is achieving something the use of force by definition couldn't do. Military strikes couldn't get the weapons out of Syria, period. Effective diplomacy is doing that today, and we need continued diplomacy to finish the job."

Seven months since that hot August afternoon, the Syrians, after fits and starts, have handed off over 500 metric tons of deadly chemicals, nearly 46 percent of their stock, and the deadline for the rest to be destroyed comes at the end of April. Which looks like a better outcome than a prolonged bombing campaign, but conventional Beltway wisdom is that Obama fumbled in August, angered the Saudis and Israelis, and "damaged American credibility," as The Wall Street Journal put it.

On the Senate floor in February, McCain stood before photographs of dead Syrian children, predicting a future president would have to "apologize" for Obama's inaction. "What haunts me even more than the horror unfolding before our eyes in Syria is the thought that we will continue to do nothing about it," McCain said.

Worst of all, by Washington insider standards, Obama theoretically diminished his own power by asking for congressional authorization. In D.C., it's an axiom that you never willingly give away any kind of power, especially executive power, and especially when it comes to military strikes.

But many of those who shared the president's reticence were the very men and women who would have been in charge of putting themselves and their people on the line: the military. In a letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee two days before the chemical attack, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dempsey expressed grave concern over establishing a no-fly zone, warning that any military action could spiral out of control and lead to American boots on the ground. "There's a broad naiveté in the political class in foreign-policy issues," retired Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold complained to The Washington Post regarding a potential strike on Syria. Beltway thinking, he said, reflects a "scary simplicity about the effects that employing American military power can achieve."

Syria's chemical weapons were being steadily offloaded when the Ukrainian crisis blew up in February, and all eyes turned to Putin's audacity. Now, hawks grumbled that if only Obama had backed his red line with some bombs, Putin might have hesitated at the Crimean border. But the president believes he achieved the objective of the "red line," Rhodes says, and doesn't regret using the term. "He actually said the opposite. To this day he would say, 'Look, chemical weapons are a distinct issue, and they are getting rid of them, and I have no regrets.'

"One of the worst arguments I've seen in recent days is that if we bombed Syria, through a bank shot you keep Putin from going to Crimea," Rhodes says. "That's not a reason to go to war. You don't go to war in Syria to send a message to Russia not to invade Crimea. Bush invaded Iraq and didn't keep Russia from going into Georgia."

The fact is, many who want America to attack Syria don't want to stop at removing chemical weapons – they want the U.S. to effect total regime change. "That's why you see this narrative about the U.S. disengaging from the world," says Rhodes. "That comes from a point of view that the only way to show you are engaged in the world is by using military force."

The carnage in Syria goes on, but the ongoing removal of Assad's stockpiles of chemical weapons is a quiet accomplishment without a single dead American soldier. Those who call it luck or accident, or who were disappointed at how the president defended his red line, might have predicted it by considering his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. "The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace," he said in Oslo in 2009. "And yet this truth must coexist with another – that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.?.?.?. War itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such."