Exclusive: Just last month, President Obama dispatched Secretary of State Kerry to secure Russian President Putin’s help in addressing the Syrian crisis and other world hotspots — but despite Putin’s agreement, Obama has reversed himself and is back hurling insults at the Russians, a troubling development, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
President Barack Obama must know better regarding the crisis in Ukraine, but he insists on reciting the propaganda lines drafted by his neoconservative and “liberal interventionist” advisers blaming everything on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Perhaps, Obama just doesn’t have the nerve to go against Official Washington’s “conventional wisdom” no matter how misguided it is. The last time that Obama went against the grain in a decisive way was when he objected to the Iraq War in 2002, but then, of course, he was just a state senator in Illinois.
President Barack Obama talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G7 Summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, Germany, June 8, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Watching his behavior in the White House over the past six-plus year, I’ve come to suspect that — if he had been a national politician amid the Iraq War fever — he would have gotten in line just like ambitious Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden did. Even as President, a position that gives him enormous power to push back against Official Washington’s “group think,” he won’t.
Instead Obama spouts stupid propaganda stuff that is ultimately damaging to the American Republic. At a moment when Obama needs Putin’s help in addressing dangerous crises in the Middle East — particularly to deal with advances by Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and Al-Qaeda’s hyper-violent spinoff, the Islamic State — Obama insists on joining in more misrepresentations about the Ukraine crisis.
At the end of the G-7 summit in Bavaria, Germany, Obama proudly announced that he had gotten the other six industrial powers to continue sanctions on Russia, based on the dubious argument that it is Russia, not the U.S.-backed regime in Ukraine, that requires more pressure to implement last February’s…