Harold Evans’s diary: Beware Obama – he always pulls the rug out from under his allies

Days ago, I’d have bet that even the most bitterly partisan Congress in generations would jib at humiliating their commander-in-chief. More than two thirds of the population, according to the polls, demanded he go to Congress before firing Cruise missiles against the Syrian regime. Well, he did, didn’t he, but appeasing the people hasn’t cut much ice with Senators of both parties to judge from the hearings this week which have provoked Secretary Kerry to wag a schoolmasterly finger. In the hour their country calls on them to make a stand against the ‘moral obscenity’ of gassing 1,429 Syrians, 426 children among them, the querulous tribunes of the people seem to have learned their lines from Rick in Casablanca: ‘I stick my neck out for nobody.’ To which, you will recall, Captain Louis Renault responds: ‘What a wise foreign policy.’ Maybe David Cameron’s stunning defeat has unnerved them. A hawkish friend hissed: ‘You Brits have betrayed us.’ As an expat who saw the first GIs come to our rescue in 1941, and stay on to lead the rebuilding of western civilisation, it’s a bit galling to be supplanted by the ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’. Or maybe the congressmen suspect the president will go wobbly again. Little noticed was Kerry’s glancing remark that his president ‘made the decision to go to Congress contrary to what many people thought he would do’. He refrained from adding ‘including his Secretary of State’. Obama has a nasty habit of pulling rugs. He did it to Ambassador Wisner, sent to Cairo in 2011 to persuade Mubarak to arrange an orderly resignation. He succeeded, only for the mortification hours later of seeing his president on TV telling Mubarak to get out forthwith. And now, having called Congress to utter, Obama says he might attack without their approval.