I’m really getting tired of all the numbskulls with no answers that continually attack the President for being weak or not having the answers to the problems of the Middle East. How about no one has the answers? How about there are no answers because the questions haven’t even been codified in this incredibly complicated part of the world? And how about the President, instead of lying to the people and instead of jumping wherever tere is profit to be made for the oil industry, has tried to think things through and make the right decisions for the nation. I understand that this is a tough concept for the Neocons who went along with the stupidity of the Bush/Cheney era but maybe it’s time that our chief executive thought things through and came to a right decision.
The Right loves to attack Obama about the fact that he wouldn’t arm the unknown moderate rebels that were supposed to be fighting Assad. Now that he is doing so, they scream flip flop, but it isn’t any such thing. It’s just that the Right isn’t bright enough to understand that we are looking at two completely different situations. Six months ago the Neocons wanted Obama to arm the so-called moderates, including the early beginnings of ISIS to fight against Assad. That was an act of war. We would have been arming rebels to fight an established government. We may not like Assad but he was the legal government of Syria. Now we are going to arm rebels to fight ISIS, a terrorist group that is fighting and committing worse atrocities than Assad ever thought of, against everyone. It’s a completely different situation. It’s not even a fine line but, yes, the Neocons still aren’t smart enough to see the difference.
It drives me nuts when I hear someone who has only a marginal understanding of what’s going on in the Middle East and the Ukraine, attack Obama for what they think he is doing or didn’t do. Obama is the only president in memory to have any kind of meaningful relationship with Russia or its leaders and it would be a much stronger relationship if he could keep our meddling, ignorant Neocons from getting in the way of what he is trying to do. Of course they don’t care about world peace. They only care about blocking Obama in his goals, creating business for the military industrial complex and helping Israel protect itself from the rest of the Middle East.
Until the Neocons and their favorite congressmen got involved in the Ukraine Obama seemed to have something working with Putin and Putin was helping us accomplish our goal of closing down Iran’s nuclear programs, as well as keeping an eye on what was happening in Yemen. Then the brain dead meddlers, led by Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, (another great oxymoron), aghast at the idea that we would accomplish anything in tandem with Russia, got involved in Ukrainian politics by indentifying Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in the Russian sights and explaining how its targeting could mess up Putin’s power base in his own country. John McCain who is surrendering to senility and Lindsay Graham who is desperately trying to hide a propensity for being a fluffy baby chick, by attempting to look like a war hawk, helped overthrow a Russian leaning but legitimate government, in a nation that had been a buffer between the East and the West. They then installed their buddies, a bunch of neo-Nazis who began making noise about joining with the West instead of staying what they were, a good transition country between East and West. Putin took one look at this, saw it for what it was, a move against Russia by the West and put his foot down. Just to show us that he meant business he grabbed Crimea and put troops on the Ukrainian border. Would we have done the same thing if Russia moved into Mexico? You bet your ass we would.
We have this terrible condition in this country. It’s called AMOPB or American’s Meddling in Other Peoples Business. We made a long-term enemy of Iran by doing that when in 1967, the CIA, along with MI6 assassinated Mohmmad Mossaddegh, a fine Prime Minister, and installed The Shah, a bumbling American sychophant. The operation in Ukraine looks exactly like that one only more botched. It gave Russia an excuse that it had long been looking for, to grab up Crimea where their naval bases have long existed.
But, back to Syria. It is now obvious that Assad is going to give us the right to invade its air space, specifically to bomb ISIS. It is also obvious to those who have been keeping up with what is going on in the world, that this connection has, despite the hassle over Ukraine, been facilitated by Putin. This means that the Putin/Obama connection is still in place despite the meddling of our incredibly stupid Neocons. This can be nothing but good for our interests in this region. It is, after all, Putin who has been most important in our negotiations with Iran over nuclear matters.
How did this connection to Putin come about? Hard to tell, but it is obvious, and probably a result of Obama’s openness to this kind of cooperation. We should be smart enough to take advantage of it. We know the Right isn’t, but the rest of us should be. The Neocons are like the puppy you take with you when you visit someone you are trying to impress and he shits on their oriental rug.
Look, Putin may not be a good guy but wants what everyone wants. He wants his country to be strong, safe and economically sound. He knows that he is already strong but not as strong as the US. He knows that Russia is safe because there really isn’t anyone but a few super-dumb U.S. Neocons that are actively looking to do it harm. He understands that the way to economic health, is through his cooperation with us, and subsequently the lifting of sanctions.
Putin doesn’t want to be our enemy. He knows that a fight with us would be disastrous and he also knows that we have enough belligerent players that he could never take away anything that we want without a fight. But like any belligerent bully he has to maintain his macho. He must belly up to the bar in situations like Ukraine. The combination of Russia and the United States could do much to bring peace and tranquility to this world. That has been Obama’s foreign policy from the beginning and it continues to be. China isn’t looking to start any wars. They are much more interested in becoming the ultimate economic power. They are smart enough to understand that, such a goal is where real power lies.
So the only thing that stands between the major players and world peace is the dummies in this country that keep trying to push people around and the Arab fanatics that want change but don’t know what to. There has been a lot of shouting about stopping the bombing and trying to negotiate. With who? There are so many terrorist groups that it is really impossible to pick one. ISIS stands out militarily, al-Qaeda as a potential overseas threat, al-Nusrah Front as the same and now there is Khoursana, whose headquarters we just bombed in Syria and who knows what they stand for.
One basic fact of negotiation stands above all else. No one wants to negotiate when they are winning. That means that we must crush ISIS’s military presence before any meaningful negotiations can take place. After that happens the only real answer will be that all of these groups will continue in some form for a long time and our only hope of eliminating them will come through education. We will have to show their recruiting base that they are not the answer. We will have to demonstrate that ours is, at least, one working solution. This will be very difficult if the President’s policies are constantly being attacked by the dumbest people with the loudest voices on the American political scene.
The working concept of a differing but cooperative out of power party, a loyal opposition, just doesn’t exist on today’s political scene. The greed, ignorance, and lust for immoral power currently displayed by the Koch’s, the corporations, the Tea Party and their super Right base, is undermining any hope that we have of ever solving our foreign policy problems to say nothing of our domestic ones. What this country desperately needs is the rise of an intelligent, moderate block of the Republican party that is willing to put country before party, and the good of the people before the greed of the rich.