Sunday, September 15, 2013

"Mr President: Don't Play Chess with the KGB!"

By Eric Margolis

President Barack Obama foolishly backed himself into a corner during the growing Syrian crisis by issuing fatwas about mythological red lines. When his bluff got called, the silver-tongued president was left twisting in the wind.

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize should be rescinded and given, instead, to Vladimir Putin.

Add a warning to Obama’s amateur foreign policy advisors: “don’t play chess with the KGB!”

In fact, Obama, who rudely snubbed former KGB agent Putin recently, owes Russia’s leader a “Bolshi Spaseba”(big thanks) for pulling his bacon out of the fire in Syria. Putin brilliantly demonstrated to the world the difference between diplomacy and force, the rapier versus the cudgel.

The American cynic Ambrose Bierce aptly defined a diplomat as “a patriot ready to lie for his country.”
True enough, but diplomacy is the essential lubricant of international relations. Ever since the Bush administration, America’s foreign relations have become militarized and run by the Pentagon while the State Department has been eclipsed. America has become addicted to small wars and debt.

The frequent threats and bombast by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – ie to “vaporizing Iran” if it dared attack Israel – have been seamlessly continued by John Kerry’s fulminations against Syria. Clinton and Kerry both have 2016 presidential ambitions and are playing to key potential donors.

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

  1. "Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize should be rescinded and given, instead, to Vladimir Putin."

    Really?!?

    Correct me, but I don't think Putin has been responsible for nearly enough murders to warrant this.

    ReplyDelete