20th February 2016

Written by Eric Zuesse for Strategic Culture Foundation

US President Obama, due to the leadership of his Secretary of State John Kerry, has now turned away from the former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s obsession against Russia, and is trying to back off from what had previously been the Obama Administration’s objective of overthrowing Russia’s Syrian ally Bashar al-Assad, whom even Western polling shows to be overwhelmingly preferred by the Syrian people to lead Syria.

Assad is supported by Syrians because he has always been resolutely determined to keep church and state separate – to keep Islam out of lawmaking – and because the vast majority of the Syrian people oppose Sharia law: they’re the least-sectarian national population in the Middle East. One poll showed that ISIS has very little public support in Syria: i.e., «ISIS (Islamic State) was rejected by 76% and approved by 21%», in one Western-done poll of Syrians. By contrast, the chief ally of the US, Saudi Arabia, is led by a jihadist royal family (by far the world’s wealthiest family), and a poll recently taken in Saudi Arabia shows 92% support there for ISIS. So, it’s not terribly surprising that the US Government, which has perpetrated so many invasions and coups and been the sponsor of death squads, etc. (in Guatemala, El Salvador, Iraq, etc.), has been co-leading, along with the Sauds, the «overthrow Assad» campaign.

But now, the US has announced on February 14th, that it agrees with Russia on Syria – that a democratic outcome there would be best – and it’s therefore urging its allies, especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey, to back off from their plans to invade Syria.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, has, on at least two separate occasions, endorsed Russia’s plan for ending the foreign-sponsored war in Syria, the war that aims to overthrow and replace Assad; Ban Ki-moon endorses Russia’s plan for internationally supervised free and fair elections to be held in Syria, in order to determine the identity of Syria’s President, so that the Syrian-war issue will be decided in a democratic way, not by international power-politics – not by foreign nations such as the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Iran, each of which nation’s aristocracy has its own interest and agenda in Syria (especially because of Syria’s centrality to the siting of oil-and-gas pipelines that would lead from the Arabic oil kingdoms into the world’s largest energy-market: Europe).

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been pushing for this type of resolution of the Syrian crisis – democracy – since 2012.

Until recently, President Obama was committed against it, and was determined to overthrow President Assad – to do to Assad what Obama and Hillary Clinton, and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, together, did to Russia’s ally Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. But, maybe it won’t repeat in Syria.

Then, it became clear recently that Secretary Kerry has somehow persuaded his boss to accept the Russian plan and to give up on being an international dictator (serving the Saudi royal family).

And, now, it appears that Obama is letting Kerry proceed to put the peace plan into place. On Sunday, February 14^th, Secretary Kerry described the agreement, which he had reached with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Under it, there will be a temporary ceasefire by all sides to the Syrian war, except a continuation of the bombing campaign against the forces of both ISIS and al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria), whom all of the foreign leaders, and the Assad government, agree are to be destroyed. (Actually, almost every fighter to overthrow Assad is a foreigner, but those in al-Qaeda and ISIS are viewed by Western publics as being the most notoriously dangerous, and so it wouldn’t have looked good for Obama to side publicly with them, and now he won’t.)

Whether or not the world’s wealthiest family, the Sauds – who co-lead, with America’s aristocracy, the developing war against Russia – will be able to be held in check by the Obama government, and will cooperate in the war against jihadists, instead of continue to insist upon invading and overthrowing Assad, isn’t yet known; but, on February 14th, Andrei Akulov at Strategic Culture Foundation, reported that Saudi Arabia was positioning 20 US bombers at southern Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base, for use in the Syrian war. If the Sauds will join in the bombing of al-Qaeda and of ISIS, then the US-Russian agreement will probably be able to succeed; but, if the Sauds instead proceed with their planned military operation to overthrow Assad, then Obama will be forced into choosing between his top ally the Sauds, and his top enemy Russia; and, notwithstanding the agreement that was announced on February 14th between Kerry and Lavrov, Obama’s decision could still go either way.

The US President’s apparently intended change-of-course is all the clearer here because it follows upon an earlier one, in which Kerry had inherited from his predecessor (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) a policy building toward war against Russia, by Clinton’s having organized (which started being put into operation on 1 March 2013) a coup d’état in Ukraine to enable US-NATO missiles to become positioned at Russia’s border for a future blitz knock-out strike to conquer Russia. President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton were following in the footsteps of US Presidents ever since in 1990 US President George Herbert Walker Bush began the decades-long plan to conquer Russia. In June 2015, Obama sidelined Kerry on the Ukraine matter and sided with Kerry’s subordinate, Victoria Nuland, who (working with the CIA) had planned the coup in Ukraine and was determined for it to follow through to its conclusion, with US missiles being positioned there on Russia’s border. (Nuland and her entire family are rabid haters of Russia.)

And, then, Nuland had to eat crow on 15 December 2015 when Kerry negotiated with Lavrov a peace process for the Syrian war. (Look at those pained and nervous faces as Nuland is forced by Kerry to shake Putins’s hand there!) That old plan, to conquer Russia, was now at least beginning to crack.

Either that old plan is in abeyance, or else it’s being outright abandoned. Whether American foreign policy is finally being fundamentally re-oriented away from its century-long central goal, of conquering the world’s most-resource-rich nation, Russia; or whether, instead, this is merely a tactical shift; is yet to become clear.

Obama’s Secretary of ‘Defense’ (that is, actually, of Offense), Ash Carter, is clearly committed to defeating Russia; and, on February 2nd he announced a fourfold increase in the placement of US weapons and soldiers on and near Russia’s European border. This appears to be Obama’s latest version of a sort of «good cop, bad cop» routine, in which Obama, right now, is following behind John Kerry as the «good cop» and Ash Carter as the «bad cop».

Ash Carter represents the Saud family and their friends – those friends being the other Arabic royal families, all of which are fundamentalist Sunnis and the world’s top funders of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other jihadist organizations, which do their royals’ international dirty-work, and which the royals are required (for PR purposes) to oppose publicly, especially in the West, even while funding jihadists to the hilt.

John Kerry is trying to represent the American public; but, he’s doing it in a Presidential Administration that, thus far, has been more inclined to please the Sauds, than to serve the American people.

Whether or not the present time is really a turning-point, isn’t yet clear, but it will become clear fairly soon. The first decider will be King Saud (Salman al-Saud, whose son, Prince Salman al-Saud, carries out his father’s instructions to lead the country). If that decision is to violate the US-Russian agreement, then America’s President Obama will be making a fateful choice, which will quickly force to the surface what Mr Obama’s top priority actually is – the Sauds (if Obama goes with Ash Carter), or else the American people (if Obama goes with John Kerry).

In any event, Obama doesn’t care at all about the Syrian people. And they know it; they loathe what the United States has been doing; they blame the US as the prime source of ISIS; they don’t accept the American propaganda against Assad, against Russia, and claiming to be against ISIS.

In the United States, the Republican Party are furious against John Kerry, and they call him ‘weak’ for negotiating with the Russians. Obama doesn’t hate Russians enough to satisfy America’s conservatives. However, within the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton is campaigning against Bernie Sanders by attacking Sanders for his saying that America should allow the Syrian people to determine whom Syria’s President will be. Even the Democratic Party is largely conservative and «stuck in a Cold War time warp», to employ the artful phrase that Obama’s pot called his opponent the Republican Mitt Romney’s kettle black, in 2012, before Obama himself became re-elected and put into place actually Romney’s policy, to conquer Russia, while Obama accused Russia of ‘aggression’ (for defending itself from his aggressions, and especially from his overthrow of Ukraine’s Russia-friendly democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych).

When a world leader is as duplicitous as Obama, the only people who trust him are either suckers, or else Obama’s aristocratic sponsors in the US and other countries. He wouldn’t be turning away from Nuland and toward Kerry now if he weren’t virtually forced by circumstances to do so. It’s certainly not what he wants to do. Putin’s decision in late September of 2015 to accept Assad’s request for Russian air power and join the war against all of the foreign invaders has trapped Obama into this.

Obama clearly wants to defeat Russia. He’s 100% with Romney on Russia, just as he was on health care (adopting Romneycare for the nation). He’s like Romney in blackface, but not as a joke – instead as a deception – and he deceives America’s voters both Republican (who think that he’s a Kenyan communist Muslim) and Democratic (who think that he’s what his rhetoric says he is). Hillary Clinton is a far less-competent liar than he is. Even most Democrats don’t trust her. But what she has going for her is the backing of Democratic Party billionaires, who are trying to stir up enough Democratic fools to vote for her so that she might be able to win the Presidency despite her incompetence. This is going to be an exciting electoral season in the US – and not only for Americans.

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