{"id":265007,"date":"2016-09-01T12:13:56","date_gmt":"2016-09-01T12:13:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/when-putin-bailed-out-obama-2\/"},"modified":"2016-09-01T21:07:02","modified_gmt":"2016-09-01T21:07:02","slug":"when-putin-bailed-out-obama-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/when-putin-bailed-out-obama-2\/","title":{"rendered":"When Putin Bailed Out Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Three years ago, when a reluctant President Barack Obama was about to launch
\n an attack on Syria, supposedly in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad
\n crossing a \u201cred line\u201d against using chemical weapons, Obama smelled a rat \u2013
\n or rather he sensed a mousetrap.<\/p>\n

Advised by some of his intelligence advisers that the evidence blaming the
\n Syrian government for the lethal sarin attack was weak, Obama disappointed many
\n of Washington\u2019s neocons and liberal war hawks, including those in his own administration,
\n by deferring action. He tossed the issue to Congress, thus guaranteeing a delay.<\/p>\n

Precisely at that key juncture, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the pressure
\n off Obama by persuading the Syrian government to destroy its chemical weapons,
\n which Assad did \u2013 while still denying any role in the attack at Ghouta, just
\n outside Damascus, on Aug. 21, 2013.<\/p>\n

Washington\u2019s hardliners were left aching for their lost opportunity to attack
\n Syria by citing the Ghouta attack as a casus belli<\/em>. But the evidence
\n suggested, instead, a well-orchestrated Syrian rebel false-flag operation aimed
\n at fabricating a pretext for direct U.S. intervention in the war on Syria.<\/p>\n

With Putin\u2019s assistance in getting Assad to surrender the chemical weapons,
\n Obama was able to extricate himself from the corner that he had rather clumsily
\n painted himself into with his earlier bravado talk about a \u201cred line.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Washington\u2019s irate neocons and many of their liberal-interventionist
\n chums felt cheated out of their almost-war. After all, Syria had been on the
\n neocon \u201cregime change\u201d list as long as Iraq and was supposed to follow the 2003
\n Iraq invasion if that neocon-driven adventure had not turned out so disastrously.<\/p>\n

Still, the neocons would make Putin pay for his interference six months later
\n by promoting an anti-Russian putsch in Ukraine, followed by U.S. and European
\n Union sanctions to punish Russia for its \u201caggression.\u201d [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s
\n \u201cWhat
\n Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.<\/a>\u201c]<\/p>\n

According to Jeffrey Goldberg who conducted a series of interviews with Obama
\n for a lengthy article in The Atlantic, the President boasted about his decision
\n on Aug. 30, 2013, to resist pressure for military action from many of his advisers
\n and instead step outside what he called \u201cthe Washington playbook.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldberg described the day as Obama\u2019s \u201cliberation day.\u201d For Secretary of State
\n John Kerry, however, Aug. 30 ended in disappointment after earlier that day
\n he had shaken the rafters at the State Department bellowing for a U.S. attack
\n on Syria.<\/p>\n

Goldberg explained that having already caved in under hardline pressure to
\n double down on sending more troops to Afghanistan for a feckless \u201ccounterinsurgency\u201d
\n operation in 2009, Obama was not in the mood for \u201cseeking new dragons to slay\u201d
\n merely to preserve his…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three years ago, when a reluctant President Barack Obama was about to launch an attack on Syria, supposedly in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad crossing a \u201cred line\u201d against using chemical weapons, Obama smelled a rat \u2013 or rather he sensed a mousetrap. Advised by some of his intelligence advisers that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-265007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}