I don’t think President Obama changed any minds with this speech. (You can find the full text here.) It begins with a detailed description of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, it continues with the acknowledgement that the American people don’t want to go to war, and it involves the promise that “I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.” There’s the weirdly funny line: “The United States military doesn’t do pinpricks.” Then there’s this part:

However, over the last few days we’ve seen some encouraging signs in part because of the credible threat of U.S. military action as well as constructive talks that I had with President Putin. The Russian government has indicated a willingness to join with the international community in pushing Assad to give up his chemical weapons. The Assad regime has now admitted that it has these weapons and even said they’d join the chemical weapons convention, which prohibits their use.

But after he suggests that perhaps the situation might be defused and asks Congress to postpone the vote until we see how diplomacy shakes out, Obama continues to make the case for strikes:

And so to my friends on the right, I ask you to reconcile your commitment to America’s military might with a failure to act when a cause is so plainly just.

To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor, for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.

Indeed, I’d ask every member of Congress, and those of you watching at home tonight, to view those videos of the attack, and then ask: What kind of world will we live in if the United States of America sees a dictator brazenly violate international law with poison gas and we choose to look the other way?

It’s a weird speech, in that you can see the stitches of where current events had to be sewn into it, and those current events should presumably have changed the tenor and the content of the rest of the speech. But they didn’t.

And Obama tried to address every major question on Syria, but he neglected to say why the US hasn’t led the UN in taking action on Syria before now. I understand that the chemical weapons are a violation of international agreements, but what does that say about the tens of thousands of people who died in the months and years before August 2013? It’s fine for every bully to murder as they so choose, as long as they don’t use chemical weapons? For a speech that was supposed to deliver clarity, it leaves me with a whole bunch of questions.