Behind Obama's 'Chaotic' Foreign Policy

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

21 August 14

resident Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been disjointed and even incoherent because he has – since taking office in 2009 – pursued conflicting strategies, mixing his own penchant for less belligerent “realism” with Official Washington’s dominant tough-guy ideologies of neoconservatism and its close cousin, “liberal interventionism.”

What this has meant is that Obama often has acted at cross-purposes, inclined to cooperate with sometimes adversaries like Russia on pragmatic solutions to thorny foreign crises, such as Syria’s chemical weapons and Iran’s nuclear program, but other times stoking these and other crises by following neocon demands that he adopt aggressive tactics against Russia, Syria, Iran and other “enemies.”

So, we have Obama covertly arming Syrian rebels, many of whom were interchangeable with Islamic jihadists, but then sending the U.S. military back into Iraq to fight some of these same extremists who spilled back into Iraq, the country where they got their start after President George W. Bush’s neocon-inspired invasion.

We also have Obama spending years ratcheting up sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program – despite Iran’s repeated offers to accept limits that would guarantee no military applications – and now finding that he needs Iran’s help to broker political changes in Iraq.

And, we have Obama needing Russia’s assistance to resolve the crises with Syria, Iraq and Iran but letting his foreign policy team alienate Russian President Vladimir Putin by stoking a confrontation over a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, which has seen the U.S. State Department weaving a false narrative that blames Putin for instigating the conflict when he was clearly reacting to provocations from the West. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Powerful Group Think on Ukraine.”]

But at the core of Obama’s muddled foreign policy is his unwillingness to challenge the prime sources of Middle Eastern instability, traditional U.S. “allies”: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Those two countries feed the violence across the region, Israel through its brutality toward the Palestinians – providing a recruiting bonanza for Islamic extremists – and Saudi Arabia via its covert funding for jihadists.

However, because Israel and Saudi Arabia get a pass on much of what they do – and Israel in particular wields extraordinary influence over the U.S. political/media process – Obama has typically tried to finesse the chaos that these “allies” wreak.

Here is also where the neocons and the “liberal interventionists” come into the picture. They demand that Obama react to “humanitarian” crises in disfavored countries, especially those on Israel’s “regime change” list, like Iran and Syria.

Official Washington put a big black hat on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and white hats on the rebels fighting to overthrow him despite the fact that the notion of “moderate” rebels was always a myth – as even Obama has acknowledged – and despite the gradual recognition that the Syrian rebels were actually dominated by al-Qaeda-connected extremists. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda.”]

In an interview this month with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Obama responded to criticism that he should have done more to support rebels fighting to overthrown Assad by saying that the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy.

“This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”

Obama added that his administration continues to have trouble finding, training and arming enough secular Syrian rebels to make a difference: “There’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”

Bending to Pressure

Nevertheless, bending to the oust-Assad demands of neocons and “liberal interventionists,” Official Washington’s conventional wisdom remains that Obama must do more to force “regime change” in Syria even as Sunni radicals from the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and the even more brutal Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have come to dominate the rebellion.

In August 2013 – still trying to maintain the Syrian “good guy/bad guy” dichotomy, “Assad bad/rebels good” – the neocons and their “liberal” cohorts came close to engineering a massive U.S. military intervention against the Syrian government over dubious charges that Assad’s regime had launched a major sarin gas attack on civilians outside Damascus on Aug. 21.

Brushing aside doubts about this scenario among U.S. intelligence analysts, Secretary of State John Kerry – who has behaved like a hand puppet for the State Department’s war hawks since taking the job in early 2013 – issued what sounded like a declaration of war against Syria in a speech on Aug. 30.

But Obama, working behind the scenes with Putin, pulled the plug on the planned U.S. air war and – again with Putin’s help – got Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons (though Assad continued denying a role in the sarin attack, which later evidence suggested might have been carried out by Islamic extremists as a provocation to draw the U.S. military into the conflict on their side).

But Putin’s intervention – disrupting the neocons’ plans for “regime change” in Syria – had other consequences. It turned Putin into Official Washington’s latest bête noire. He would soon find his more immediate interests targeted as neocons, such as National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, and State Department hardliners encouraged a political crisis in Ukraine on Russia’s western border.

Even as the likes of neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and neocon Sen. John McCain clearly pushed for the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, the Obama administration and the U.S. mainstream media blamed the crisis that followed Yanukovych’s Feb. 22 overthrow on Putin. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]

Rather than challenge this false anti-Putin narrative, Obama acquiesced to the “group think,” even joining the Putin-bashing over Ukraine. That, in turn, complicated the prospects for cooling down other international hotspots, such as Syria and Iran. I’m told that senior Russian officials feel so betrayed by Obama and so distrust him that they have little interest in cooperating with him in the future.

As Ukraine descended into civil war and as the U.S.-backed Kiev regime dispatched neo-Nazi militias to the east to serve as storm troopers killing ethnic Russians, the West looked on impassively. Despite the death toll rising into the thousands, Obama also averted his gaze. The black-hat/white-hat narrative (Putin in the black hat and the Kiev leaders in the white hats) had to be maintained. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ignoring Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]

Similarly, when Israel launched its latest “mowing the grass” slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza in July, Obama defended Israel’s actions even though it further fueled anti-Western anger across the Muslim world. The “responsibility to protect” crowd inside the administration – the likes of U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power – also fell silent. “R2P” apparently is a situational ethic depending on who’s doing the killing and who needs the protection.

‘R2P’ Double Standards

Ignored during the bloodshed in Ukraine and Gaza, the principle of “R2P” was suddenly back in vogue when the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria expanded its offensive inside Iraq threatening Yazidis and other religious minorities. To avert a potential humanitarian disaster in Iraq, Obama ordered U.S. aerial attacks on ISIS forces, a bombing campaign that relieved the threatened Yazidis and helped Kurdish forces reclaim some strategic positions around Mosul.

In a bid to calm sectarian tensions in Iraq, Obama also pressed for the removal of Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his replacement by another Shiite leader, Haider al-Abadi. But that required the help of Shiite-rule Iran, which remains near the top of the Israeli/neocon “enemies list.”

Following this anti-Iran line, Kerry and the State Department have been dragging their heels on a final agreement that would constrain but not end Iran’s nuclear program – and then ease economic sanctions against Iran. Despite those sanctions and the frustrations over the nuclear talks, Iranian authorities helped Obama by convincing Maliki to step down.

Yet, Obama’s scattershot approach to foreign policy – lacking any consistent theme – has made his approach to the world chaotic and left many allies and adversaries confused. When Official Washington’s pols and pundits talk about Obama being “weak” on foreign policy, they mean that he hasn’t projected American military power enough, that he hasn’t been a consistent “tough guy,” that he hasn’t always done what they want done.

But another way to look at Obama’s “weakness” is that he has rarely stood firmly against the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” buddies. He has let himself be bullied into counterproductive military adventures, including the counterinsurgency “surge” in Afghanistan in 2009, which accomplished little, and the ill-fated “regime change” in Libya in 2011 which turned that country into a failed state that has destabilized northern Africa. (In both cases, Obama succumbed to pressure from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other hawks.)

Obama also covertly authorized the arming of “moderate” Syrian rebels, emptying CIA warehouses of “deniable” weapons (though he didn’t go as far as Clinton and other hawks wanted). The result of Syria’s civil war, however, was the strengthening of the extremists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria whose strategy of unapologetic barbarity was so extreme that they were repudiated by al-Qaeda. That brutality was demonstrated again with this week’s execution of U.S. journalist James Foley.

A Consistent Obama Policy

A more cohesive – and pragmatic – approach to the world and especially the Middle East would involve repudiating the selective R2P “morality” of the neocons and the “liberal interventionists” along with distancing U.S. foreign policy from the influences of Israel and Saudi Arabia.

A “realist” strategy would call for Obama to work more consistently with former adversaries, most notably with Russia and Iran but also Syria in a regional approach toward defeating Islamic terrorism. The realignment would require cracking down on covert Saudi funding for the jihadists and demanding that Israel finally reach an equitable settlement with the Palestinians.

The new strategy would mean seeking a practical (though far from perfect) political resolution of the Syrian conflict with President Assad continuing in power at least for the immediate future. The strategy would finalize an Iranian nuclear deal that would offer reasonable guarantees that the nuclear project will not produce a bomb and give Iran relief from punishing economic sanctions.

Another step would involve pressuring the Ukrainian government to reach a negotiated settlement with ethnic Russian rebels in the east and recognizing that Kiev needs positive relations with Russia as well as with the European Union. Resolution of that civil war also could help calm European financial markets and avert the possibility of a “triple-dip” European recession with blowback harm on the U.S. economy.

This “realism” would surely provoke howls of protests from neocon and R2P advocates – because of the poor human rights records of Syria, Iran and other “adversaries” – but it would reduce Official Washington’s hypocrisy which tolerates human rights abuses when inflicted by forces dispatched by Israel (to kill Palestinians), Ukraine (to kill ethnic Russians), or Saudi Arabia (to engage in acts of terrorism in Syria, Iraq, Chechnya and elsewhere).

If Obama would embrace his inner “realist,” there would be an internal consistency to his approach to the world and other countries would know what to expect, rather than have to deal with his ad hoc reactions to international crises. This more cooperative approach also would not stop Obama from criticizing the human rights abuses of any government or advocating for democratic reforms.

But this pragmatism for peace – and the end of neocon absolutism – might have the significant benefit of ending unnecessary wars and saving lives.

Why I Oppose Anti-Semitism

By Russell Brand, Reader Supported News

21 August 14

he year is 1992, I am 16 years old. It is Pesach, the Jewish feast of Passover; I am in Frinton On Sea, Essex, with the Hirsch family at the evening meal. Wine is drunk, there are incantations and Torah readings, my mate Matt's little sister is beautiful, the sense of family unity and tradition is also beautiful.

Me and Matt, now obediently sat in those little hats, kippahs they're called, had dropped some acid earlier in the evening and the whole thing suddenly gets a bit too much. Matt's dad is sort of singing in Hebrew, the old bloke they invite every year from down the street, is smiling with cardigan kindness, Matt's sister is still beautiful, and of course, there's the acid. I am overwhelmed by melancholy and, oddly guilt, at the holocaustal images that lysergically zip through my sad and lively mind and I, in front of everyone, begin to weep.

Matt, also on acid remember, having unwisely risked bringing his younger eccentric friend to a family occasion and now confronted with the surely unanticipated challenge of his mate crying at dinner nudges me and asks me "what's up" in a way that indicates, understandably, "shut up'. I'm on a roll now though and sentimentally tormented by the torturous trip logic that had Hitler's Final Solution not been halted, none of these people would've been here and given that the enactors of the genocide had been ordinary German people, had I been born 70 years earlier and been German, I could have been a participant.

I am at my first Pesach with a lovely family and feel personally responsible for the holocaust; I think that constitutes "a bad trip".

Now I hope the above doesn't constitute the anti Semitic version of "Some of my best friends are black" (they are) but having recently and vehemently been called an anti Semite the memory has taken on new significance.

On my online news analysis show the trews (terrible name, I agree, true news) I supported a petition by the online activism group Avaaz, a really decent outfit who have campaigned for same sex marriage, stricter gun controls and compassionate drug laws. So you see what side of the argument they're generally on. In this case it was a petition to lobby businesses that profit from the conflict and violence in Gaza.

Businesses like Barclays Bank that manage the account of drone makers El Bit, Dutch pension fund ABP, British security firm G4S, Caterpillar and others directly profit from the atrocities that we have all been shocked by in recent weeks.

We analysed a Barclays commercial in which their brand was cosily presented as wholesome and affable pointed out the disingenuity, and reasonably averred that businesses should not be profiting from the current conflict. When you think about it, to disagree with that is to assert that big businesses should be profiting from the conflict; that is a much more extreme position. It strikes me too that ideologically that is a determinedly capitalistic position as oppose to a theological one.

I have frequent cause to reflect upon and quote Albert Maysles' maxim "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance." It seems at first a meek kind of tyranny; one scarce imagines that in Poland under the Nazis, people huddled together in ghettos, bemoaning the removal of nuance. Genocide, starvation and warmongering must surely have been more pressing manifestations of tyranny.

It is worth considering though that the sanding down of inconvenient facets of an argument allows a prejudicial version of reality to dominate. In its most extreme form this mechanic facilitates tyranny, more extreme in nature.

Removing the nuance of the civil rights struggle, slavery, the shooting of Trayvon Martin and failure to convict his killer, the social unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of teenager Michael Brown can be condemned as unacceptable violence. With those details brought rightly to the fore the unrest is totally reasonable.

Media is of course where this form of tyranny is most obvious. When the Daily Mail present a story on benefit fraud or the consequences of "spiraling" immigration no nuance that interrupts the tide of their righteous rage is allowed to survive, no mitigation, or broader context, all that remains is a salient nub, pulsating with poisonous data.

Me and my mate Gareth set up the trews in order to address this phenomenon. Not as pioneering crusaders for truth and justice, just because it's easy to do and a laugh. Fox News quickly emerged as a reliable source of content to criticize because of the vehement delight they seem to take in galling contrarianism. Bill O'Reilly for example is so consistently outraged by the disadvantaged in society that in the end it's hard to see him as human, more a kind of permutation of an incessantly inflamed hemorrhoid. Like his head and whole identity is secondary to a constant discomfort at the seat of his being. A hollering parasite of his own punctured anus.

A previous video we made concerned Fox News' shop-dummy-polemicist Sean Hannity. In the clip we analysed, Hannity refused to let his guest, there to represent a Palestinian perspective on events in Gaza, speak, instead jabbing his index finger and belching damnation like he dined only on curried hatred. Fulfilling our self-imposed brief to provide true news we offered up some of the facts about the conflict that had been censored according to Fox's tyrannical stance.

Like anyone who has spent any time reflecting on this complex issue I naturally wanted to make positive suggestions for positive action. The petition against European businesses provides exactly that opportunity. This is clearly distinct from a boycott against Israel, which means abstaining from buying goods from Israel.

The obvious reason that this distinction is important is if we are to boycott all nations that practice unsanctioned violence against a weaker opponent we would begin with the UK and USA and include every nation on earth. That is, I suppose, why Avaaz's petition is appropriate and effective; no boycott against any nation was proposed. Instead a petition against businesses that profit from the horror in Gaza was set up and now has nearly 1.7million signatures.

When my support of this petition was reported significant nuances were removed. It was reported that I "urged a boycott of Israel". Why is this incendiary language and misrepresentation favoured?

It is difficult to countenance condemnation when the action for which you have been condemned has been editorialized to be conflagratory. My support of the petition has been attacked as anti Semitic. I understand anti Semitism to be a hatred of Jews, the denial of the right for Jews to have a homeland, the denial of the horrors of the last century and the plight of the Jewish people throughout history. This is obviously not my position, anti Semitism, Islamaphobia and homophobia are all prejudices that I resolutely reject, like any right-minded person. In the context of the accusation that I face, anti Semitism must be taken to mean opposing big businesses making profit from violence against Palestinian people.

I don't see Israeli military action in Gaza as a religious issue. For me it seems to be the action of an extreme right wing government that has strong economic ties to right wing organisations in the US. These affiliations are economic, not theological and are defined here with typical expertise by Noam Chomsky.

Vying with death threats to be the most frequent form of attack that I have received is the assertion that I have no right to get involved in such complex issues. As the above link to Chomsky indicates there are far more thorough and well researched sources to turn to for information. It is important though that ordinary people can be included in this debate because we are compelled to participate by the common thread of humanity that unites us all.

It is the exclusion of the sane majority that allows extremists to prosper. The insanity across the Middle East is so deeply terrifying and giddyingly futile that most people, despondent and bilious want to look away. We know the US can't be trusted. We know the UN are inactive. We know something has to be done to stop the violence in Gaza and the new medieval horror of ISIS but who can we trust? Our own governments, about who we know nothing for certain except they lie and pursue their own ends, sexing up and dumbing down, arming then attacking, fair-weather friends but perennial weapons suppliers?

One of the few ways we, ordinary, uneducated and as yet not directly effected people can participate in a climate where big business and big government do nothing but profit and prevaricate is to let them know that they do not act on our behalf and will not profit from our indifference. Methods like the Avaaz's petition provide a moderate but direct way to tackle extreme problems that we can all participate in.

This is not a boycott of Israel, of Israeli goods. I would not endorse the withdrawal of kosher goods from supermarkets which is happening in Britain, measures like that negatively impact ordinary people who are nothing to do with this extraordinary problem.

We can no longer allow arguments and our shared communicative spaces to be dominated by extremist profiteers. We must disavow anti Semitism and all forms of prejudice that lead to exclusion and execution like the people of Palestine now face. All governments and institutions that permit violence and proliferate weapons in order to meet territorial or economic objectives ought be equally condemned and confronted and I, like all of us, welcome any means through which we, the ordinary people, can be empowered to act.

"The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity" wrote WB Yeats after the First World War, in anticipation of the Second. We all know the famous diatribe "When they came for the socialists, I did nothing, when they came for the Jews I did nothing, when they came for me, there was no one left to do anything." These words and Yeats' poem address the same issue, tyranny and the same people; us, the majority compliant in our silence, not because we are indifferent but because we are baffled, frightened and cowed. Threatened and condemned if we speak out but we have no choice. We the ordinary people of the world, American, Kurdish, British, Palestinian, Israeli and Syrian have to identify with our common humanity, not our superficial, constructed differences, whether ideological or territorial, or be dominated by extremists. Extreme transnational crusaders who want to profit and extreme religious groups who want to kill for land and power, whether in the Middle East or the West.

There are some who will be determined to call me an anti semite, those who call some of the finest Jewish thinkers in the world like Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky anti semites are unlikely to abate. We cannot placate those who are so determined to censor debate that they include in their damnation Jewish people whose anti Semitism, if real would lead to the annhilation of their own families and themselves. We cannot placate those that will say that when I write "profiteers" or "capitalists" or "transnational crusaders". I am using a code to infer Jewish people. These are not euphemisms, I literally mean profiteers and capitalists. There are some so virulently and grotesquely attached to their objectives that nothing but silent compliance is acceptable. To me they are not. The only way we will achieve peace is for ordinary people of all faiths and colours to condemn violence in Gaza, Iraq, Ferguson and wherever it is found. When humble means emerge, such as this petition, which applies pressure exclusively to those who benefit from destruction the rest of us have an obligation to sign it. Small measures like this remind the powerful that they are not free to divide and desecrate, they are accountable to us and when we unite their tyranny is overthrown.