Obama, Leading The Way To Peace

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"The Agency [CIA] has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms. But in this case [Syria], the White House ordered it to stand down."
"[At the beginning of the (nuclear) talks in 2013, the U.S. position was for Iran to dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure but by the end of the talks in 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry and his team] agreed that Iran would then be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint."
"The Revolutionary Guard continues to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, including ballistic missiles inscribed with threats against Israel on their nose cones. Khamenei and other revolutionary leaders, meanwhile, fine-tune their rhetorical attacks against the United States, seeming to need the American threat to justify their existence."
Jay Solomon, The Iran Wars

Barack Obama began his presidency with the clearly stated intention of altering the state of American relations with the Middle East, the Arab and Muslim world, to present the United States as a friend, not an opportunistic oppressor, and to gain or regain trust that was ostensibly lost when his predecessor invaded Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, gaining the hostility of countries other than Israel by the process. His intention was made known publicly; the world was invited to witness diplomacy at the highest level in action.

Of course, when the senior Bush's administration entered Iraq to restore sovereignty to Kuwait, the coalition that challenged Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait included Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. There was no resentment then at American intervention in Arab/Muslim affairs. American support for the Shah of Iran earned the United States the undying enmity of the Ayatollahs who deposed the Shah and transformed Iran into the Islamist state -- with malevolent intentions toward its neighbours and the West -- that it has since become.

One of the first international overtures expressed by the newly-elected Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States was to state his intention to extend an open hand in greeting as a friend, to the Islamic Republic of Iran. This, before the new president even travelled to Egypt to extend his friendship to the Muslim world. Ayatollah Khomeini was pleased to respond to that gesture with a clenched fist which has never since, by his successor opened to resemble an open hand, following through on Khomeini's grand plan to dominate the Middle East and remain at crossed scimitars with the West.

When Iran's Greens comprised of the regime's opponents, Western-oriented liberal-minded Iranians staged a massive protest against the confining strictures of the Ayatollahs they fully expected that the United States would render encouragement and even practical assistance of some kind, but none of that ever materialized. The Obama administration preferred to look the other way. And it has continued that manner of disengagement in the Middle East; it betrayed its long-time regional ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and supported his successor the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammad Morsi.

And when Syrian Sunnis held their protests against the Baathist Shiite regime of President Bashar al-Assad, the preference of the Obama administration was to continue to look the other way. No encouragement was forthcoming from the United States which had, under the second (G.W.) Bush administration continually expressed its wish to help the Arab/Muslim Middle East on its road to democracy. The all-out war that Assad launched on the protesters guaranteed a civil war would result, and as the country disintegrated into factions, foreign Islamist fighters infiltrated.

Bashar al-Assad has enjoyed five years of punishing push-back against Sunni Syrians, depriving almost a half-million of them, men, women, children and the elderly, of their lives. The country's infrastructure lies in ruins. Of the 22-million Syrians that comprised the population, half have become displaced, four and a half million of them refugees, over one-quarter of whom have invaded Europe looking for an exit from hell.

In Gouta three years ago, Assad launched a sarin gas attack killing 1,300 Sunni Syrians by asphyxiation. This event caught President Obama's attention since he had warned Assad to avoid the criminal excesses of chemical warfare. But the threat he had issued was never acted upon and even though in concert with Moscow, Washington went through the theatrical charade of having Assad declare all his chemical weapons assets to be destroyed, not all were revealed.

So that napalm is now being packed into the barrel bombs previously just packed with shrapnel, to make a more effective killing machine; the shrapnel, if it doesn't kill often results in massive wounds' with the napalm added, Assad's 'terrorist enemies' can be shredded and their flesh burned, all in one fell swoop and that's efficiency in killing for you. Those deadly barrel bombs have been falling on the civilians living in Syrian neighbourhoods in Aleppo and elsewhere at the rate of 220 weekly.

If verification was needed beyond the claims of the victims and the medical personnel examining them, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons' investigators have detected the precursors of nerve agents at Syrian regime facilities that Assad's gatekeepers had somehow overlooked, failing to declare them when his chemical weapons stockpile was ostensibly being surrendered for removal and eventual destruction.

The Syrian-American Medical Society has found that three out of every four of the previously verified 161 chemical attacks in Syria took place after Mr. Obama's warning of dire consequences to ensue should President Assad use chemical weapons on his population. A study was released by the SAMS, titled A New Normal: Ongoing Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria, revealing the strategy of the Assad regime, which chose to substitute chlorine gas for the previously utilized sarin gas in bombarding Syrians.

Mr. Obama was more interested in, and fixated on U.S. relations with the Syrian regime's most reliable backer, however; detente with Iran's ayatollahs was top of the list of priorities for the American president, and if there were sacrifices to be made to accomplish that, then so be it. According to Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Jay Solomon, in his new book, The Iran Wars, Iranian negotiators in the G-5 nuclear deal threatened to retreat from any bargaining with the White House if the U.S. intervened to remove Assad from power.

The tide has completely turned in Assad's favour, where a year ago the dimension of the rebel advance seemed to spell the end of the Baathist regime. This, despite the Shabiha death squads, the Iran-backed Shiite militias from Iraq, the Lebanese-based Hezbollah prepared to do the bidding of Iran, and Iran's own al Quds brigade of the Republican Guard, all working to destroy the Syrian rebels' advances in aid of supporting Bashar al-Assad's rule.

blog.udn.com

Thanks to the nuclear deal, Iran once again has discretionary spending potential, and while some Quds Force commanders have died in the Syrian conflict, others are prepared to continue directing strategic battles and Iran-sponsored mercenaries from abroad, including Central Asia are gaining ground on the rebels with their Islamist supporters against Assad, thanks to the entry of Russian warplanes and members of its military on the ground in Syria as well as naval ships pounding off long-range missiles into Syria from the Caspian Sea.

And now the Russian air force has also added cluster munitions, to the napalm, shrapnel and chlorine raining down from Assad's barrel bomb rampage in Aleppo and Homs, Idlib and Daraya. And the Obama administration is content to co-ordinate its military and intelligence agencies in the Middle East for coordinated air attacks, joint command and control headquarters, accelerating a bombing campaign to target the foreign terrorist groups in Syria, when the absolute foremost terrorist group -- Assad's murderous regime -- gets its free pass.