"It’s time Mr. Obama started emphasizing what the United States can do instead of what it cannot"

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S acknowledgment that “we don’t have a strategy yet” in Syria understandably attracted the most attention after his perplexing meeting with reporters Thursday. But his restatement of the obvious was not the most dismaying aspect of his remarks. The president’s goal, to the extent he had one, seemed to be to tamp down all the assessments of gathering dangers that his own team had been issuing over the previous days.

This argument with his own administration is alarming on three levels.

The first has to do with simple competence.