The Little Game of Obama in Syria

In four years of the Syrian civil war, the butcher Bashar Assad did what he could to slaughter moderate opposition, making life easier for the crazed jihadists, to augment the Islamic State. Victory for Manichaeists and opportunists such as Vladimir Putin. Our man in Moscow is charging the world to take a position between Assad and terror; a defeat for Barack Obama, the man with the bitter nuances — a strategic and humanitarian fiasco in Syria.

In the British journal The Daily Telegraph, Ruth Sherlock has an illustrative story about the climate of defeat in Washington and the fact that the Obama administration has tacitly accepted the rules of the game imposed by Moscow.

Putin capitalized on American indecision in Syria — Obama never engaged with vigor in the quagmire. The plan to arm rebels to fight both Assad as well as the Islamic State group was a humiliation, while the tactic of bombing the terrorists got limited results. Putin took advantage by sending military reinforcements to the dictator’s army and surprised Washington with a project of sharing information about the Islamic State group with Assad and the governments of Iran and Iraq. The Obama administration showed resignation with regards to the survival of Bashar Assad, although little had changed in the internal dynamics of Syria. The Islamic State group controls vast territory, but 65 percent [of the country] continues to submit to the daily brutality of the dictator, who indiscriminately uses barrel bombs in the civil war and the disappearing of dissidents. It is worth repeating that the principal reason for the exodus of refugees is the actions of the Assad regime and not the YouTube barbarity of the Islamic State group.

However, in Ruth Sherlock’s account, the narrative in the United States — in politics and in the media — is about the threat of the Islamic State group. Being an experienced reporter who covered the Middle East, Ruth Sherlock said that three years ago, she had open doors to the circle of powers in Washington when she wanted to talk about the complexities of the Syrian situation. Now the only chat of interest is talk about the threat of the Islamic State group.

There exists a symbiosis between the Assad regime and the Islamic State group. For the Syrians, victims in this crossfire, it is a cruel joke to hear Barack Obama parroting that the U.S. is a moral force.