Russell Leiman: Zane’s uncompelling argument

J. Peder Zane’s June 22 column “Shameful attempts to blame GOP ‘bigotry’ ” castigated President Obama’s anti-terrorism policies, which, he said, “created the vacuum that enabled the rise of ISIS.”

He quoted Atlantic magazine correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg in support of this conclusion. Presumably, then, Zane has read Goldberg’s April article “The Obama Doctrine,” which received global attention.

In that article, Obama said “the red-line crisis (regarding use of chemical weapons in Syria) is the point of the inverted pyramid upon which all other theories rest.” Zane’s article illustrated this statement.

Goldberg also wrote that Secretary of State John Kerry “expresses no patience for those who argue, as he himself once did, that Obama should have bombed Assad-regime sites in order to buttress America’s deterrent capability” and quoted him saying “You’d still have the weapons (both Assad and anti-Assad) there, and you’d probably be fighting ISIL for control of them. It just doesn’t make sense.”

So, to justify his unequivocal indictment of Obama, Zane needs to make a compelling argument that Obama is wrong in his conclusion, also quoted in the Goldberg article, that “the price of direct action in Syria would be higher than the price of inaction.”

If he can’t do that, responsible journalism requires that he be more circumspect in drawing definitive, yet unproven, conclusions.

This story was originally published July 4, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Russell Leiman: Zane’s uncompelling argument."