US Secretary of State John Kerry meeting Syrian rebels
The past few months since the Syrian chemical weapon incident have seen a sensational back and forth action in international politics. On the one hand, Obama had played a very safe but misleading role in the resolution of the conflict.
Obama cautious on the outcome of British Commons vote
There is no denying the American president played his Democrat-cards well. As the representative of the party supposedly-opposed to wars abroad (unlike the Republicans), he halfheartedly rallied for an intervention on the Syrian conflict by waiting for the outcome of the British House of Commons on their vote against an attack on Syria.
The epic August 30 disavowal against David Cameron’s support for another British-and-American misadventure reassured the international community that a decade is not too distant to forget the humiliation and outcome of the Iraq and Afghan carnage wrought by the United States. Despite the UK’s backing out of the Syria strike, Obama says the US will “continue to consult” its British ally.
Obama ‘consults’ Congress on Syria intervention
In a ‘true’ Democrat move, Obama, the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, played again a safe but misleading path to a ‘resolution’ on the Syria conflict by presenting Congress intelligence reports that apparently proved Bashar al-Assad’s hands on the most recent chemical attack. Certainly, on the back of Obama’s head, he knows he will be denied the vote he needs for authorization of another ‘coalition of the willing’ on Syria.
Now who could deny Obama’s heroism after the Congress turn-down? Undeniably in his Oval Office, the president is whispering he did what he could but that Congress was to blame for a failure to authorize the bombing of another Muslim country. At a lecture at the University of Michigan, David North described the US Syria policy as possibly a “carefully planned diplomatic masterstroke.”
American media’s disgusting propaganda against Syria
Below the official Washington statements, the media, headed by CNN, has been skillfully playing their deception, including:
• The dropping of the word ‘alleged’ chemical weapons use from news
• That if it weren’t for America’s threat, the Syrian government will not be willing to negotiate (from the beginning, Bashar Al-Assad and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed a peaceful resolution of the conflict, and so the willingness-to-negotiate trophy should go to Russia, not the US)
• That Syria’s possession of chemical weapons violates international rules, forgetting that this is the ‘best’ Syrian deterrent against Israel’s far more destructive and illegal possession of nuclear weapons
• That the Syrian rebels are being likened to the ‘freedom fighters’ supported by the West and Saudi Arabia against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan back in the 80s
• In lieu of the threat to use force, there is no mention on how extensive the West supports the rebels in Syria. In fact, the decision to use force is in large part dictated by the desperate situation of the Syrian rebels
Russia’s role in conflict resolution
If there is any other international leader who should be eulogized for brokering a deal on the removal of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, it should be Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin leader knows that a peace deal is the only path to Syria’s return to normalcy, and he knew this from the beginning. Record-wise, Putin was a staunch renouncer of Western interventionism in the past.
In a recent gathering with academics and research analysts in Russia, he felt comfortable in criticizing the West’s double standards (especially with Israel), hypocrisy, and moral decline. Vis-à-vis Israel, the Russian leader proposed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, which happens to include Israel’s secret nukes and Syria’s chemical weapons.
Also at the recent Shanghai Security Organization (SCO) meeting held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Putin insisted that “military interference from outside the country without a UN Security Council sanction is admissible” and that the summit jointly opposed “Western intervention in Syria, as well as the loosening of the internal and regional stability in the Middle East.”
As in the past, China, for its part, mostly favors Russia’s foreign policy. At the SCO meeting, Chinese president Xi Jinping expressed his country’s opposition to a Western-led strike against Syria, which is a close ally of Iran, a major energy supplier to China.
The Iran Response
Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani, perceived as a moderate statesman, attended the SCO meeting, where he agreed on keeping Syria’s chemical weapons under international control, adding that this has given “hope that we will be able to avoid a new war in the region.”
Views From The East 