Tag Archives: President Obama

US Sends Troops To Syria: Here Are The Questions The Media Should Be Asking, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 31, 2015 | Leave a comment

Zero Hedge continues its excellent coverage and analysis of the Middle East. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

On Friday, The White House announced that the US is set to put boots on the ground in Syria.

Predictably, virtually no one in the mainstream media is asking the right questions.

A painful Q&A with Josh Earnest saw the White House Press Secretary attempting to explain to reporters that there’s a distinction between “advise and assist” and “combat.” In short, everyone was keen on documenting the stark contrast between placing spec ops troops in harm’s way and Obama’s 2013 pledge to “not put boots on the ground” inside Syria.

While documenting the purported “shift” in strategy may make for good weekend reading for America’s clueless masses, it completely misses the point. As recently released helmet cam footage clearly demonstrates (assuming it actually depicts what Washington says it depicts) 30 Delta Force commandos were involved in a single operation in Iraq. That is, nearly as many troops as Obama is now set to send to Syria fought just last week in one battle against ISIS. And while that’s Iraq and we’re now talking about Syria, the distinction is to a large extent meaningless – there are American boots on the ground in the region and there have been in one capacity or another for at least 12 years.

The real questions revolve around where these troops are going to be placed, what their objectives are, and ultimately, how the Pentagon plans to do this without putting them in the crosshairs of either the Russians, the Turkish air force, or Hezbollah. Here’s a bit of color from WSJ on what the “plan” is:

Up to 50 U.S. special-operations troops will assist Syrian rebel units spearheading what the Pentagon says would be a new military offensive against the militant group, marking a sharp escalation in the level of direct U.S. involvement on the ground inside Syria. The American forces are to link up with local forces in Kurdish-controlled territory whose mission will be to choke off supply lines to Islamic State militants in their Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.

The first phase of the new campaign is expected to kick off with an operation in northern Syria as early as next week, officials said. U.S. drones and fighter planes will provide the Syrian fighters with air support.

Under Mr. Obama’s new orders, the American commandos will operate in Syria under what the Pentagon calls an advise-and-assist mission, and will not accompany local forces on any of their operations “for the foreseeable future,” a senior U.S. defense official said.

But other defense officials said they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the forces would be pulled into occasional firefights with Islamic State military given their proximity to the confrontation line. The officials cited as an example last week’s raid in Iraq in which a U.S. commando was killed.

To support local forces with their ground campaign, Mr. Obama has authorized the deployment of A-10 Warthog ground-attack planes as well as F-15 fighters to the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, administration officials said.

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Obama Won’t Admit the Real Targets of Russian Airstrikes, by Gareth Porter

Posted on October 17, 2015 | Leave a comment

When it comes to foreign, military, and intelligence policy, what comes out of the US government is  mostly fiction. The US public has limited interest, and it’s harder for even the interested to check the government’s “facts” versus domestic affairs. From Gareth Porter, at the Middle East Eye via antiwar.com:

The US response to Russia’s new Syrian military campaign in support of the Assad regime has struck a pose of moral superiority by arguing that the Russians have not been targeting the Islamic State but rather the non-ISIS Syrian opposition to the Assad regime.

That US response is superficially accurate but deliberately misleading. Although the Russians are not focusing on targets in ISIS-controlled territory, there is a very good reason: it is not ISIS but the forces aligned with al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra or al-Nusra Front, that pose the most immediate threat to the very existence of the Assad regime.

In a series of statements on the Russian military campaign, the US Defense Department has hammered the Russians for not targeting ISIS as Moscow initially claimed – later on the Russian rhetoric shifted to “terrorists”. The US statements strongly implied that it was the US-backed “moderate” Syrian groups opposed to the Assad regime that are being attacked.

Major news media have taken the same line in covering the Russian offensive. In an Associated Press story on 13 October, for example, Ken Delanian described the CIA as supplying “so-called moderate rebels to oppose Assad” for more than two years, along with its “Arab allies” and that American officials “have watched in recent days as the Russian bombs and missiles have targeted those groups”.

Delanian even quoted Jeffrey White of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the think tank supporting Israeli interests, who complained that the United States had abandoned its moderate allies. “We’ve aligned ourselves to these guys, we trained them and paid them and sent them off to battle, and when the going gets tough, we’re not there,” said White.

But this framing of the issue fundamentally misrepresents the situation in Syria by conjuring up a nonexistent powerful US-backed “moderate” force while diverting attention from the real threat posed by al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise. The Russians are not hitting some imaginary set of “moderate” Syrian armed groups opposing the Assad regime; they are overwhelmingly focused on targeting the military command in which al-Nusra Front is the central strategic force.

To continue reading: Obama Won’t Admit the Real tarbgets of Russian Airstrikes

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Is Barack Obama Actually TRYING To Start World War III?, by Michael Snyder

Posted on October 14, 2015 | 1 comment

From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

Why has Barack Obama airdropped 50 tons of ammunition into areas that “moderate rebels” in Syria supposedly control? This is essentially the equivalent of poking the Russians directly in the eyes. Much of this ammunition will end up in the hands of those that the Russians are attempting to bomb into oblivion, and so to Russia it appears that we are attempting to make their job much harder. And of course the truth is that there aren’t really any “moderate rebels” in Syria at all. Nearly all of the groups that are fighting are made up primarily of radical jihadists and/or hired mercenaries. Personally, I don’t see anyone over there that you could call “the good guys”. At the end of the day, the U.S. supports just about anyone that wants to get rid of the Assad regime, and the Russians are working very hard to keep Assad in power. Just like the civil war in Ukraine, the conflict in Syria is in great danger of being transformed into a proxy war between the United States and Russia, and many fear that these conflicts could eventually be setting the stage for World War III.

The ferocity of Russian airstrikes in Syria has surprised observers all over the planet, and over the past couple of days these airstrikes have been extended to include some new areas…

Russian Air Forces have extended the range of their airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Syria to four provinces, focusing primarily on demolishing fortified installations and eliminating supply bases and the terrorists’ infrastructure.

Over the last 24 hours Russian aircraft have attacked terrorist positions in the Hama, Idlib, Latakia and Raqqa provinces of Syria. In total, 64 sorties targeted 63 Islamic State installations, among them 53 fortified zones, 7 arms depots, 4 training camps and a command post.

When I read reports like this, I am deeply troubled. The Obama administration claims that it has been bombing ISIS positions in Syria for over a year. So why in the world do these targets still exist?

Was the U.S. military incapable of finding these installations?

That doesn’t seem likely.

So why weren’t they destroyed long ago?

Did the Obama administration not want them destroyed for some reason?

What seems abundantly clear is that the Russians are doing what the Obama administration was either unwilling or unable to do. There is now mass panic among ISIS fighters, and thousands of them are fleeing the country…

An estimated 3,000 Islamic State fighters as well as militants from other extremist groups have fled Syria for Jordan fearing a renewed offensive by the Syrian army in addition to Russian airstrikes, a military official has told RIA news agency.

“At least 3,000 militants from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), al-Nusra and Jaish al-Yarmouk have fled to Jordan. They are afraid of the Syrian army having stepped up activities on all fronts and of Russian airstrikes,” the RIA source said.

The mainstream media in the United States is not talking much about this, are they?

To continue reading: Is Barack Obama Actually Trying To Start World War III?

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The Tragic Ending To Obama’s Bay Of Pigs: CIA Hands Over Syria To Russia, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

Zero Hedge with another excellent update and analysis of the situation in Syria. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

One week ago, when summarizing the current state of play in Syria, we said that for Obama, “this is shaping up to be the most spectacular US foreign policy debacle since Vietnam.” Yesterday, in tacit confirmation of this assessment, the Obama administration threw in the towel on one of the most contentious programs it has implemented in “fighting ISIS”, when the Defense Department announced it was abandoning the goal of a U.S.-trained Syrian force.

But this, so far, partial admission of failure only takes care of one part of Obama’s problem: there is the question of the “other” rebels supported by the US, those who are not part of the officially-disclosed public program with the fake goal of fighting ISIS; we are talking, of course, about the nearly 10,000 CIA-supported “other rebels”, or technically mercenaries, whose only task is to take down Assad.

The same “rebels” whose fate the AP profiles today when it writes that the CIA began a covert operation in 2013 to arm, fund and train a moderate opposition to Assad. Over that time, the CIA has trained an estimated 10,000 fighters, although the number still fighting with so-called moderate forces is unclear.

The effort was separate from the one run by the military, which trained militants willing to promise to take on IS exclusively. That program was widely considered a failure, and on Friday, the Defense Department announced it was abandoning the goal of a U.S.-trained Syrian force, instead opting to equip established groups to fight IS.

It is this effort, too, that in the span of just one month Vladimir Putin has managed to render utterly useless, as it is officially “off the books” and thus the US can’t formally support these thousands of “rebel-fighters” whose only real task was to repeat the “success” of Ukraine and overthrow Syria’s legitimate president: something which runs counter to the US image of a dignified democracy not still resorting to 1960s tactics of government overthrow. That, and coupled with Russia and Iran set to take strategic control of Syria in the coming months, the US simply has no toehold any more in the critical mid-eastern nation.

And so another sad chapter in the CIA’s book of failed government overthrows comes to a close, leaving the “rebels” that the CIA had supported for years, to fend for themselves.

To continue reading: The Tragic Ending To Obama’s Bay of Pigs

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War Party Targets Putin and Assad, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on October 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

Having established a base on the Syrian coast, Vladimir Putin last week began air strikes on ISIS and other rebel forces seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad.

A longtime ally of Syria, Russia wants to preserve its toehold on the Mediterranean, help Assad repel the threat, and keep the Islamic terrorists out of Damascus.

Russia is also fearful that the fall of Assad would free up the Chechen terrorists in Syria to return to Russia.

In intervening to save Assad, Putin is doing exactly what we are doing to save our imperiled allies in Baghdad and Kabul.

Yet Putin’s intervention has ignited an almost berserk reaction.

John McCain has called for sending the Free Syrian Army surface-to-air missiles to bring down Russian planes. Not only could this lead to a U.S.-Russia clash, but U.S.-backed Syrian rebels have a record of transferring weapons to the al-Qaida affiliate.

The end result of McCain’s initiative, sending Stingers to Syria, could be airliners blown out of the sky across the Middle East.

Hillary Clinton wants the U.S. to create a no-fly zone. And Friday’s Wall Street Journal endorsed the idea:

“Mr. Obama could make Mr. Putin pay a price. … In Syria the U.S. could set up a no-fly zone to create a safe haven for refugees against … Mr. Assad’s barrel bombs. He could say U.S. planes will fly wherever they want, and if one is attacked the U.S. will respond in kind.”

U.S.-Russian dogfights over Syria are just fine with the Journal.

Saturday’s Washington Post seconded the motion, admonishing Obama: “Carve out safe zones. Destroy the helicopter fleet Mr. Assad uses for his war crimes.”

Has the War Party thought this through?

Establishing a no-fly zone over Syria, which means shooting down Syrian fighter-bombers and helicopters, is an act of war. But when did Congress authorize the president to go to war with Syria?

When last Obama requested such authority — in 2013, when chemical weapons were used — the American people arose as one to say no to U.S. intervention. Congress backed away without even voting.

Unprovoked air strikes on Syrian government forces would represent an unauthorized and unconstitutional American war. Does the Party of the Constitution no longer care about the Constitution?

Is a Republican Congress really willing to give Barack Obama a blank check to take us to war with Syria, should he choose to do so?

Is this what America voted for in 2014?

To continue reading: War Party Targets Putin and Assad

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The Hope Behind Putin’s Syria Help, by Ray McGovern

Posted on October 5, 2015 | 1 comment

Whether they admit or not, Syria confronts the proponents of US involvement in Middle Eastern wars with all the contradictions that have been inherent in their p0licy since 2001. Vladimir Putin moved his piece into position and declared “Check.” Odds are low the US will avoid checkmate this time, but even it does, it doesn’t have the pieces or the board position to recover and manage a draw. From Ray McGovern at consortium news.com:

Russia’s airstrikes on rebel strongholds in Syria, now in their fifth day, are a game-changer. To borrow an aphorism from philosopher Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Yogi also warned, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

What follows, then, will focus primarily on how and why the violence in Syria has reached this week’s crescendo, the magnitude of the tipping point reached with direct Russian military intervention in support of Syria’s government, and the self-inflicted dilemma confronting President Barack Obama and his hapless advisers who have been demanding “regime change” in Syria as the panacea to the bloody conflict.

Think of this piece as an attempted antidote to the adolescent analysis by Steven Lee Myers front-paged in Sunday’s New York Times, and, for that matter, much else that’s been written about Syria in the Times and other mainstream U.S. news outlets. Many articles, in accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of bad faith, have willfully misrepresented his vow to strike at all “terrorist groups” as meaning only the Islamic State as if Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other violent extremists don’t qualify as “terrorists.”

However, if Washington finally decides to face the real world – not remain in the land of make-believe that stretches from the White House and State Department through the neocon-dominated think tanks to the editorial pages of the mainstream media – it will confront a classic “devil-you-know” dilemma.

Does Washington really think that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as demonized as he has been as a key player in a conflict blamed for killing more than 250,000, is worse than the beheaders of the Islamic State or the global-terrorism plotters of Al Qaeda? Does President Obama really think that some surgical “regime change” in Damascus can be executed without collapsing the Syrian government and clearing the way for an Islamic State/Al Qaeda victory? Is that a gamble worth taking?

President Obama needs to ask those questions to the State Department’s neocons and liberal interventionists emplaced by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who – like Israel’s leaders – positively lust for Assad’s demise. “Regime change” in Syria has been on the Israeli/neocon to-do list since at least the mid-1990s and the neocon idea last decade was that Assad’s overthrow would immediately follow the Iraq “regime change” in 2003, except the Iraq scheme didn’t work out exactly as planned.

But there may be some reason to hope. After all, Obama showed courage in overcoming the strong resistance of the neocons to the recent nuclear deal with Iran. So, he may have the intelligence and stamina to face them down again, although you wouldn’t know it from his recent rhetoric, which panders to the war hawks’ arguments even as he resists their most dangerous action plans.

At his news conference on Friday, Obama said, “in my discussions with President Putin, I was very clear that the only way to solve the problem in Syria is to have a political transition that is inclusive — that keeps the state intact, that keeps the military intact, that maintains cohesion, but that is inclusive — and the only way to accomplish that is for Mr. Assad to transition [out], because you cannot rehabilitate him in the eyes of Syrians. This is not a judgment I’m making; it is a judgment that the overwhelming majority of Syrians make.”

But Obama did not explain how he knew what “the overwhelming majority of Syrians” want. Many Syrians – especially the Christians, Alawites, Shiites and secular Sunnis – appear to see Assad and his military as their protectors, the last bulwark against the horror of a victory by the Islamic State or Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which is a major player in the so-called “Army of Conquest,” as both groups make major gains across Syria.

Obama’s cavalier notion, as expressed at the news conference, that “regime changes” are neat and tidy, easily performed without unintended consequences, suggests a sophomoric understanding of the world that is stunning for a U.S. president in office for more than 6 ½ years, especially since he adopted a similar approach toward Libya, which now has descended into violent anarchy.

Obama must realize that the alternative to Assad is both risky and grim – and some of the suggestions coming from presidential candidate Clinton and other hawks for a U.S. imposition of a “no-fly zone” over parts of Syria would not only be a clear violation of international law but could create a direct military clash with nuclear-armed Russia. This time, the President may have to get down off his high horse and substitute a reality-based foreign policy for his rhetorical flourishes.

Yet, it is an open question whether Obama has become captive to his own propaganda, such as his obsession with Syria’s use of “barrel bombs” in attacking rebel strongholds, as if this crude home-made weapon were some uniquely cruel device unlike the hundreds of thousands of tons of high explosives that the United States has dropped on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries in the last dozen years.

Does Obama really think that his “humanitarian” bombs – and those given to U.S. “allies” such as Saudi Arabia and Israel – don’t kill innocents? In just the past week, a Saudi airstrike inside Yemen reportedly killed some 131 people at a wedding and an apparent U.S. attack in Kunduz, Afghanistan, blasted a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, killing at least 19 people.

To continue reading: The Hope Behind Putin’s Syria Help

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War Party Hates Putin – Loves al-Qaeda, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on October 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org:

“War on terrorism” turns into cold war against Russia

As Russian fighter jets target al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, the Western media is up in arms – and in denial. They deny the Russians are taking on ISIS – and they are indignant that Putin is targeting al-Qaeda, which is almost never referred to by its actual name, but is instead described as “al-Nusra,” or the more inclusive “Army of Conquest,” which are alternate names for the heirs of Osama bin Laden.

And there are no ideological lines being drawn in this information war: both the left and the right – e.g. the left-liberal Vox and the Fox News network – are utilizing a map put out by the neoconservative “Institute for the Study of War” to “prove” that Putin isn’t really attacking ISIS – he’s actually only concerned with destroying the “non-ISIS” rebels and propping up the faltering regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The premise behind this kind of propaganda is that there really is some difference between ISIS and the multitude of Islamist groups proliferating like wasps in the region: and that, furthermore, al-Qaeda is “relatively” moderate when compared to the Islamic State. Yes, incredibly, the US and British media are pushing the line that the al-Qaeda fighters in Syria, known as al-Nusra, are really the Good Guys.

Didn’t you know that we have always been at war with Eastasia?

There is much whining, this [Thursday] morning, that a supposedly US-“vetted” group known as Tajammu al-Aaza has felt Putin’s wrath – but when we get down into the weeds, we discover that this outfit is fighting alongside al-Qaeda:

“Jamil al-Saleh, a defected Syrian army officer who is now the leader of the rebel group Tajammu al-Aaza, told AlSouria.net that the Russian airstrikes targeted his group’s base in al-Lataminah, a town in the western Syrian governorate of Hama. That area represents one of the farthest southern points of the rebel advance from the north and is therefore a crucial front line in the war. An alliance of Syrian rebel factions, including both the al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front and groups considered by Washington to be more moderate, successfully drove Assad regime forces out of the northern governorate of Idlib and are now pushing south into Hama.”

By the way, according to the Pentagon’s own testimony before a congressional committee, only sixty “vetted” fighters were sent into Syria to take on both Assad and ISIS. And while they denied, at first, that their pet “moderates” betrayed Washington and handed over most of their weapons and other equipment to al-Qaeda in return for “safe passage,” the Pentagon later admitted it. Furthermore, we were told that these were the only “vetted” fighters actually in the field, but now we are confronted with “Tajammu al-Aaza,” which – it’s being reported – is deploying US-supplied missile guidance systems against Syrian government forces.

So a handful of “vetted” fighters suddenly turns into an entire armed force – one which, you’ll note, has effectively merged with al-Qaeda.

The lies are coming at us so fast and thick in the first 24 hours of the Russian strikes that we face a veritable blizzard of obfuscation. They range from the egregious – alleged photos of “civilian casualties” that turn out to be fake – to the more subtle: a supposed Free Syrian Army commander is reported killed by a Russian air strike, and yet it appears that very same commander was kidnapped by ISIS last year. We are told that the town of Rastan, the site of Russian strikes, isn’t under the control of ISIS – except it was when ISIS was executing gay men there.

To continue reading: War Party Hates Putin—Loves al-Qaeda

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Obama Re-Defines Democracy – A Country that Supports U.S. Policy, by Michael Hudson

Posted on September 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Yves Smith at nakedcapitalism.com:

In his Orwellian September 28, 2015 speech to the United Nations, President Obama said that if democracy had existed in Syria, there never would have been a revolt against Assad. By that, he meant ISIL. Where there is democracy, he said, there is no violence of revolution.

This was his threat to promote revolution, coups and violence against any country not deemed a “democracy.” In making this hardly veiled threat, he redefined the word in the international political vocabulary. Democracy is the CIA’s overthrow of Mossedegh in Iran to install the Shah. Democracy is the overthrow of Afghanistan’s secular government by the Taliban against Russia. Democracy is the Ukrainian coup behind Yats and Poroshenko. Democracy is Pinochet. It is “our bastards,” as Lyndon Johnson said with regard to the Latin American dictators installed by U.S. foreign policy.

A century ago the word “democracy” referred to a nation whose policies were formed by elected representatives. Ever since ancient Athens, democracy was contrasted to oligarchy and aristocracy. But since the Cold War and its aftermath, that is not how U.S. politicians have used the term. When an American president uses the word “democracy,” he means a pro-American country following U.S. neoliberal policies. No matter if a country is a military dictatorship or the government was brought in by a coup (euphemized as a Color Revolution) as in Georgia or Ukraine. A “democratic” government has been re-defined simply as one supporting the Washington Consensus, NATO and the IMF. It is a government that shifts policy-making out of the hands of elected representatives to an “independent” central bank, whose policies are dictated by the oligarchy centered in Wall Street, the City of London and Frankfurt.

To continue reading: Obama Re-Defines Democracy

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Obama Deifies American Hegemony , by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on September 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

Today is the 70th anniversary of the UN. It is not clear how much good the UN has done. Some UN Blue Hemet peacekeeping operations had limited success. But mainly Washington has used the UN for war, such as the Korean War and Washington’s Cold War against the Soviet Union. In our time Washington had UN tanks sent in against Bosnian Serbs during the period that Washington was dismantling Yugoslavia and Serbia and accusing Serbian leaders, who tried to defend the integrity of their country against Washington’s aggression, of “war crimes.”

The UN supported Washington’s sanctions against Iraq that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. When asked about it, Clinton’s Secretary of State said, with typical American heartlessness, that the deaths of the children were worth it. In 2006 the UN voted sanctions against Iran for exercising its right as a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty to develop atomic energy. Washington claimed without any evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon in violation of the non-proliferation treaty, and this lie was accepted by the UN. Washington’s false claim was repudiated by all 16 US intelligence agencies and by the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground in Iran, but in the face of the factual evidence the US government and its presstitute media pressed the claim to the point that Russia had to intervene and take the matter out of Washington’s warmonger hands. Russia’s intervention to prevent US military attacks on Iran and Syria resulted in the demonization of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. “Facts?!, Washington don’t need no stinkin’ facts! We got power!” Today at the UN Obama asserted America’s over-riding power many times: the strongest military in the world, the strongest economy in the world.

The UN has done nothing to stop Washington’s invasions and bombings, illegal under international law, of seven countries or Obama’s overthrow by coup of democratic governments in Honduras and Ukraine, with more in the works.

The UN does provide a forum for countries and populations within countries that are suffering oppression to post complaints—except, of course, for the Palestinians, who, despite the boundaries shown on maps and centuries of habitation by Palestinians, are not even recognized by the UN as a state.

On this 70th anniversary of the UN, I have spent much of the day listening to the various speeches. The most truthful ones were delivered by the presidents of Russia and Iran. The presidents of Russia and Iran refused to accept the Washington-serving reality or Matrix that Obama sought to impose on the world with his speech. Both presidents forcefully challenged the false reality that the propagandistic Western media and its government masters seek to create in order to continue to exercise their hegemony over everyone else.

What about China? China’s president left the fireworks to Putin, but set the stage for Putin by rejecting US claims of hegemony: “The future of the world must be shaped by all countries.” China’s president spoke in veiled terms against Western neoliberal economics and declared that “China’s vote in the UN will always belong to the developing countries.”

In the masterly way of Chinese diplomacy, the President of China spoke in a non-threatening, non-provocative way. His criticisms of the West were indirect. He gave a short speech and was much applauded.

To continue reading: Obama Deifies American Hegemony

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Live from New York, it’s ‘Putin the Great’, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on September 27, 2015 | Leave a comment

SLL has a commentary in the works on much of what this article analyzes. From Pepe Escobar at rt.com:

It’s the ultimate geopolitical cliffhanger of the season: will US President Barack Obama finally decide to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, either this Friday or during the UN General Assembly next week in New York?
Russia’s game changer in Syria – not only weapons delivery but also the prospect of actual intervention by the Russian Air Force – has left the Beltway reeling.

Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs Walled Muallem has made it clear to RT that direct Russian involvement in the fight against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh and those “moderates” (US neocon designation) of Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. Al-Qaeda in Syria, is even more important than the arms delivery.

Washington, meanwhile, remains mired in a geopolitical black hole as far as Putin’s strategy is concerned. The Obama administration’s response will hinge on how Putin’s speech at the UN will be received across the world, and how the frantic diplomacy related to the Syrian theatre of war will fare.

It’s naïve to interpret the Russian military build-up as a mere show of force, an invitation to the Americans to finally sit down and discuss everything from southwest Asia to Ukraine.

It’s also naïve to interpret the move as Moscow’s desperation for some kind of dialogue, any dialogue. There are no illusions at the Kremlin. Obama and Putin exchanged a few words in Beijing late last year – and that’s it; no official visits, no detailed meetings.

What’s certain is that Putin’s latest chess move carries the potential to smash to pieces the Obama administration’s post-Maidan “strategy” of isolating Russia. Thus the predictable fear, loathing and paranoia permeating the Beltway.

Old Cold War 2.0 habits die hard – if at all. Washington may extend the proverbial “financial support” to failed state, bankrupt Ukraine, and the pressure over the EU to keep sanctions throughout 2016 will remain. US ‘Think Tankland’ keeps frantically spinning that the Obama administration is “not ready” to deal with Russia.

To continue reading: Live from New York, it’s ‘Putin the Great’

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