Obama's Flawed Vision of the World - The Daily Beast - 0 views
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At West Point, Obama takes the U.S. out of the Afghan frying pan only to leap back into the Mideast fire, where a crucial shift in Syria policy may be in store.
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Obama is now moving to provide moderate rebels in Syria with overt training from U.S. special operation forces in addition to the covert aid presently fed by the CIA. That move will make sense only if the White House formulates a viable strategy for Syria. Right now, its strategy of upending President Bashar Assad makes no sense. If he’s not winning, he’s certainly not losing. And no amount of projected aid to the moderate rebels will change that unfortunate but unarguable fact.
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Thus, Obama either will have to change his means and provide massive aid to these rebels, which he will not do, or he will have to change his goal of eliminating Assad. This may well surprise experts, but senior administration officials tell me that Obama has been modifying his objective and is now prepared to work with Assad, to some degree, along with the moderate rebels, against what the White House finally has come to see as the real and major threat—the jihadists. These senior officials further say that they expect support in this new policy from previous opponents, i.e. from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Let us hope that this is true.
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By the former president of the Foreign Policy Council. Are we dizzy yet? He says that Obama has decided to work with Syrian President Assad to root out the real threat, the jihadists. Might it not have saved tens of thousands of Syrian lives to have refused in the first place to assist the Sauds and Qatar in arming the same jihadists and sending them as an invading force to Syria? And yes, it's true; the Sauds have also done a 180-degree turn here.