{"id":189238,"date":"2015-10-07T03:04:04","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T03:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/obama-boots-syrian-peace-chance\/"},"modified":"2015-10-07T14:45:05","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T14:45:05","slug":"obama-boots-syrian-peace-chance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/obama-boots-syrian-peace-chance\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Boots Syrian Peace Chance"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>By Robert Parry<\/p>\n<p>President Barack Obama is turning his back on possibly the last\u00a0best chance to resolve the bloody Syrian war\u00a0because he fears a backlash from Official Washington\u2019s powerful coalition of neoconservatives and \u201cliberal interventionists\u201d along with their foreign fellow-travelers: Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf sheikdoms.<\/p>\n<p>The route toward peace would be to collaborate with Russia and Iran to get Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to accept a power-sharing unity government that would fairly represent Syria\u2019s major religious and ethnic groups \u2014 Christians, Alawites, Shiites and moderate Sunnis \u2014 along with a commitment for free, internationally monitored elections once adequate security is restored.<\/p>\n<p>But for such an arrangement to work, Obama also would have to crack down aggressively on U.S. regional \u201callies\u201d to ensure that they stopped funding, supplying and otherwise assisting the Sunni extremist forces including Al Qaeda\u2019s Nusra Front and the Islamic State (or ISIS). Obama would have to confront the Sunni \u201callies\u201d \u2014 including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey \u2014 as well as Israel.<\/p>\n<p>His pressure would have to include stern action aimed at the global finances of the Gulf states \u2014 i.e., seizing their assets as punishment for their continuing support for terrorism \u2014 as well as similar sanctions against Turkey, possibly ousting it from NATO if it balked, and a withdrawal of political and financial support for Israel if it continued helping Nusra fighters and viewing Al Qaeda as the \u201clesser evil\u201d in Syria. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2015\/02\/04\/al-qaeda-saudi-arabia-and-israel\/\"><u>Al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia and Israel.<\/u><\/a>\u201d]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2015\/10\/06\/obama-boots-syrian-peace-chance\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Robert Parry President Barack Obama is turning his back on possibly the last\u00a0best chance to resolve the bloody Syrian war\u00a0because he fears a backlash from Official Washington\u2019s powerful coalition of neoconservatives and \u201cliberal interventionists\u201d along with their foreign fellow-travelers: Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf sheikdoms. The route toward peace would be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-189238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}