I.O.U.: Iraq, Obama and Ukraine

President Obama’s team of national security advisers have a few bad poker hands they are in the process of playing. The first regards all the trillions they have spent on National Security and the NSA yet not foreseeing the collapse and routing of the U.S.trained Iraq Army forces by Sunni jihadists, and second, the blind eye turned toward the Ukraine by supporting Neo-Nazis whom just so happen to be conducting ethnic cleansing among the Russian speaking populous of the East. Although Obama has openly stated that his administration and national security staff has been working continuously on options for dealing with ISIS, and that he has proposed additional sanctions upon Russia, nothing has been done and nothing has been effective.

First looking at Iraq, albeit our problem began with President George W. Bush, Obama has done little to reduce the blood shed that has been occurring in Iraq for the past two years and like the mainstream news media, he and his administration have ignored all of the chaos in the nation and placed it on the back burner, as if it was a done deal and the war was over. This is one reason that the President was caught slipping and leaves the question, was it that they did not see this as a possibility of occurring, given how unstable the country has been since the U.S. appointed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki took over? Or was it that the US intelligence community didn’t see the threat coming from ISIS? Either way, regardless of who is in the executive office, both are unacceptable. Moreover, things were made worse when last year, President Obama openly and falsely claimed and took credit for saying the war in Iraq was over, just as it was when Bush made the claim a few months after he started the war and again in2008.

Based on this alone, one should ask how can the U.S. administration install a friendly government in Iraq and but cannot even get them to accept to extend an agreement or form an inclusive government when you giving said nation billions annually? I know, defeats reason. The Obama administration explicitly detailed that he wanted such but in the same breath asserted they would scale back support involve if the Sadrists were a significant player in any Iraqi government: all in congruence with his desire to use both Iraq and forces on Syria at the forefront of his desire to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

Maybe we would be better off asking why any sensible person in leadership would commit more U.S. blood for a lost cause that was previously lost. To do such in any form or fashion is an embarrassment and exhibits that the administration’s policy was really no policy at all, but instead one without specific and tangible aims or outcomes. Let’s be clear, in a few days, the gains that America and coalition forces made over a decade of occupation, resulting in nearly 5,000 American lives and $3 trillion, are gone and we didn’t see it coming. Thus far, it is clear that the administration was moving the Iraqis faster than they should have seeing it is clear the military can’t function as a military.

But what is more troubling, is trying to figure out why Washington selected Nouri al-Maliki, after all he is one of the few Iraqi political leader who doesn’t have any clout, I mean, he doesn’t have a militia like other Iraqi leaders, does he? The fact is that Maliki is dependent on Iran for his power and Iran is backing Syria, both of which in many respects have been keeping him in power, I am sure Obama knew this, yet he appointed him against all the desires his Syrian and Iranian foreign policy wish to accomplish. The record shows that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with leaders of Arab countries in Saudi Arabia a few months backs in which all party’s agreed that ISIS in Syria and Iraq was a real threat, but no plan were developed on how to address these events.

And just like in Iran where Obama’s foreign policy is out of sync with the realities in the region, the same consistency is evident in the Ukraine. The entire world knows that Yanukovich’s democratically elected government was removed by military force instigated by right wing neo-Nazi and Neo fascist via U.S. and E.U urging. Yet, just like his administration was supposedly caught by surprise at the rate in which the well-armed and highly trained ISIS fighters took over Mosul, they said the same in February, when it failed to foresee the events in Crimea.  Likewise as we observed in Iraq and Syria, where the rise of ISIS negate Obama’s claims of a happy ending to the war in Iraq, the recent moves of Russia has proffered the same, moreover, it makes one query how effective will his success be in Afghanistan since he will employ a carbon-copy the of the same strategy for withdrawal there by 2016.

In the Ukraine, like Maliki at first, President Obama considers Billionaire Petro Poroshenko’s victory a good thing. Consequently, he immediately began bombing the Russia speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk to deal with the so-called “terrorist” with the approval of our Nobel Peace prize winning president. Even more peculiar is that through this support, Obama has placed his administration in violation of the U.S. law he has mentioned several times over the past six years that prohibits financially aiding any coup installed government such as the case in Ukraine. Think about it, the Obama administration didn’t see what happened in Egypt as a coup, so the military aid to Egypt kept flowing to the tune of $1 billion plus\.

As it stands, the Obama administration is in the midst of an extremely tenuous situation. The most significant is ISIS: especially not knowing the group’s true strength and how to respond. Particularly, the fact that the U.S. currently has NO intelligence on Abu Bakral Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who was once held by the US in Camp Bucca Iraq (the Obama administration shut down the Bucca prison camp and released its prisoners, including Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in 2009).

Now in Iran, Syria, Iraq, India, Egypt and the Ukraine, Russian foreign policy appears to be the lone consistent winner. Although President Obama has stated he will invest $1 billion in stepping up the US military presence in Eastern Europe based on the tension in the Ukrainian, since March, the White House has approved more than $23 million in security assistance to Ukraine and is now saying it will give Kiev an additional $5 million aid. Meanwhile, China and Russia are in the midst of a massive Gold buying spree plus the deals with the nations mentioned above, makes any sanctions mentioned by the present administration an effort in futility.

In all reality it was foolish for the President to promise the impossible of ending a war in which his policy has virtually flamed Sunni and Shiite sectarian violence. Then remains the question many have yet to ask, why was such a vile person considered fit to be released into the world, when times before at closings, administration’s would just relocate such person to Gitmo? Yes the administrations have some cards it must play and they may not produce a winning hand.  Bluffing and inconsistencies in foreign policy have seemed to put the U.S. all over the map. One the one hand  we are aware that the Iraqi leadership is backing Syria against the U.S. supported militants yet say little if anything about it, and on the other that Maliki continues to implement repressive attacks on and against Sunni in Iraq. In both Iraq and Ukraine, it may be best for the administration let things go as they will and take an I.O.U., because America has messed things up enough already in both regions.

U.S. Foreign Policy: A Civil War Here, a Civil War There

I am so glad cats like John McCain and John Kerry didn’t win the Presidency. Likewise I am just as sad that George W. Bush and Barack Obama won the presidency and if there is a God, I am certain he would let Sponge Bob Square Pants ascend to the Presidency before Hillary Clinton. And all of this is stated in objective terms, the most prominent being that the Bush and Obama Administration’s foreign policy when implemented only results in civil war, no matter where it is practiced, but especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

Case in point, this past Sunday, during a joint press conference with Egypt’s newly elected President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, "The United States of America is not responsible for what happened in Libya, nor is it responsible for what is happening in Iraq today."  In the same briefing, he later stated, "US is not engaged in picking or choosing any one individual... it's up to the people of Iraq to choose their own leadership."

Both of these statements are a complete and utter ignorance of the facts from a historical and temporal context or either blatant lies. Although vilified for stating such, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei correctly accused Washington of just exploiting the violence in Iraq and Syria to regain control of Iraq by placing it once again “under its [U.S.] hegemony” and rule of “its stooges.” This has always been the premise of plutocratic desires under the storm cloud of nation building and implementing democracy, as amorphous a concept as it is. In 2003, I read that “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history” – Ari Shavit, April 5, 2003 Haaretz News Service-Israel. I find this statement, with the Semitic tone aside both accurate and consistent with history insofar as we can evaluate the aforementioned from the perspective of the foreign policy statements and practices of the last two U.S. executive administrations.

The general problem is that regardless of political affiliation, the neo’s (neoconservatives and neoliberals) have a greater concern in their corporate financiers interest than the citizenry of America, and this my friend is regardless of political party and or the race of the President. Their preference is to place an inordinate amount of focus and attention on places like Syria, Libya, Iraq, Ukraine and other foreign nations, than the needs of U.S. citizenry. Instead, they apply the same standard to us as a foreign nation: drones, massive intrusive spying, domestic economic destabilization and labeling the average man a terrorist simply for exercising liberties guaranteed via the Bill of Rights.

This is clear to see for the thinking person.  Let us examine the first example of President George W. Bush and de-Baathification. Shortly after the fall of the Saddam regime, via L. Paul Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), in one of his first things President Bush introduced was the de-Baathification program to remove members of the Ba’ath Party from their positions of authority and to ban them from future employment in government. They [the Bush Administration] selected Ahmed Chalabi to head of the De-Baathification Committee, which had the goals of preventing the Baath from regaining power, avoiding and retribution against Baathists and isolating the majority of Baathists from their party leaders.

This process of de-Baathification was supported via the forfeiture and seizure of all party assets and property, which was to be held in trust by the CPA for the use and benefit of the Iraqi people, albeit there were no real Iraqi citizens involved, just an Iraqi de-Baathification Council (IDC), composed entirely of Iraqi nationals formerly living in the U.S. and Europe mainly.

From the beginning de-Baathification was a very incongruent and f##ked up process for lack of a better phrase. Not only did it not achieve it aims, it also polarized Iraqi politics and worse, made the Iraqi military and government even more unstable after U.S. military intervention and occupation. Then it brought in al-Qaeda, to a region where it had never existed before as well as driving a wedge between Sunni, Shia and even Kurds in Iraq. And after all of this, Barack Obama came in, and when you thought his promise to end the war would make things much better, they actually followed the GWB foreign policy playbook and made things even worse.

 

Taking U.S. policy a step farther, the Obama Administration took up the doings of the fat cats of Saudi Arabia and Qatar along with big banks of the West and have in effect declared war on Shiites the world over. Now to be clear, I would like to see Obama, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Rice, Kerry, Rice, and tried, as War Criminals and should be.

Kerry comments only reinforce the failures of America’s Manifest Destiny foreign policy. As such, no past Administration or current one will ever take responsibility for a foreign policy of endless wars of aggression and regime change. It may even be more appropriate to call U.S. foreign policy as the policy of civil war.  Where ever we insert our political nose abroad, the result is the destruction of a stable nation and civil war.  We see it now in the Ukraine where Obama supports the fascist Poroshenko’s new government, as well in the outcome via our interference in Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, and Pakistan or wherever the U.S./NATO decided to involve themselves without request. Again, categorically, I repeat, the US is responsible for Libya, Tunis, Egypt and Syria.

 

And now the fine mess of Obama policy has by intent, morphed into a sectarian Sunni versus Shia conflict. Strangely, all in nations for the most part which were secular governments. The Obama administration has consistently taken a foreign policy approach in the Middle East and Africa of over-throwing secular governments, this time it is Syria. This was done by intentionally arming and letting groups like ISIL grow stronger and stronger. He openly complains against Assad in Syria, and Iran, but ignores how Sunni leaders in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia violate the human rights of their majority Shia populations. Think about it, several months ago when the Iraqi government asked for U.S. airstrikes to repel ISIS, Obama refused, which was probably the first time he refused such an offer from an allied government. I mean, he didn’t even ask for approval to conduct illegal airstrikes in 8 other countries under the guise of fighting terrorism.  Even stranger was observing President Obama refusing to acknowledge that our closer allies in the region (Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia) have been giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Islamic extremist terrorist group invading Iraq and attacking the Syrian government.

 

Lastly, the assertion that the U.S. believes that people have a right to decide if they wish to govern themselves is only true when the U.S. say’s so, for we have seen them place many in power whom the nations had no interest in being brought to power as we recently saw with Poroshenko in the Ukraine, Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and to a certain extent, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt. S###, the U.S. even installed Saddam Hussein.

 

American policy will never be in a position to address the multitude of issues in the Middle East whether it pertains to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Indo-Pakistani conflict, or the rise of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somali. I don’t know what world Kerry and the present administration, nor the prior administration live. I guess it is like Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for Hitler’s Third Reich said: “Tell a good lie enough times and people will think it is the truth.”