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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 11/14/15

Grandmaster Putin Beats Uncle Sam at His Own Game

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Reprinted from Counterpunch


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Imagine that you despised your brother-in-law and wanted to kill him. But you didn't have the guts to do it yourself so you hired a hit-man to do the job for you.

Would you still be guilty of murder?

You're darn right, you would be. So let's apply this same rule to US foreign policy: Would it be just as wrong to invade a country, kill its people and topple its government with militants that you funded, armed and trained as it would be with your own US troops?

Yep, it sure would be. So while some people might think that it was smarter for Obama to use a proxy-army in Syria instead of US soldiers, morally or legally speaking, there's really no difference between what he did and what Bush did in Iraq. A US invasion is a US invasion. Period. It doesn't matter if you use for-hire killers or your own guys. It's all the same. Obama is just as guilty as Bush.

Why does it matter?

It matters because Obama's Syrian policy has resulted in the deaths of 250,000 people and created 11 million refugees. That's more refugees than Iraq. And the funny thing is, the media doesn't even talk about it, in fact, there's not one major media outlet in the entire country that has stated what everyone knows to be the obvious truth; that the United States is 100 percent responsible for the refugee crisis -- 100 percent! Assad had nothing to do with it. US policy and our buck-passing president are entirely to blame.

The point is, the Democrats pursue the same policies as the GOP with some minor-tweaking at the edges. So if the hard-charging, but dimwitted Republicans decide to drag the country to war on a pack of lies, then the shifty Dems will try to be smarter about it; they'll try to micromanage the public relations, preempt antiwar marches in US cities and avoid US casualties at all cost. Obama has succeeded in all of these things. There's nobody in the streets protesting, the media has convinced most people that Syria is in the throes of a civil war, and there have been no flag-draped coffins returning to Andover Airbase because their are no US boots on the ground. For all practical purposes, the Democrats have created our first completely invisible war. That's quite an accomplishment, don't you think?

The only glitch is that, after four years, Obama's plan for toppling Bashar al Assad has failed. True, he's destroyed the world's oldest civilization and condemned its people to a hardscrabble existence for the next 20 years or so, but he's failed in his primary objectives; to remove Assad, partition the country, and secure the territory he needs for vital pipeline corridors. So, you see, all the sneaky, underhanded methods the Democrats have used to secretly prosecute their war on Syria have backfired because the US is going to lose the war anyway.

Why is the US going to lose the war?

Because the Russian-led coalition has stopped Washington dead-in-its-tracks and sent the terrorist vermin fleeing for cover, that's why.

On Tuesday, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and fighters from the feared Lebanese national militia, Hezbollah, recaptured the strategic Kuweires military airbase in North Syria killing hundreds of ISIS terrorists and liberating 250 Syrian soldiers who had been holding out at the base for more than two and a half years. The battle was downplayed in the western media mainly because it represents a critical turning point in the conflict. The Russian-led coalition is now in the driver's seat while the "US-backed" jihadis are on the run. The war's momentum has totally shifted in Putin's favor which means that Putin's going to win and Obama's going to lose.

Kuweires is Syria's Stalingrad, the famous WW 2 siege which lasted from August 1942 to February 1943 when the German Wehrmacht was repelled by the ferocious Red Army in the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. While the scale of Kuweires is smaller by many orders of magnitude, its importance can't be overstated. It wasn't ISIS that was defeated at Kuweires; it was US foreign policy, a policy which has reduced a large swathe of the planet, extending from North Africa, across the Middle East and into Central Asia, into smoldering rubble. Kuweires was a key node in Washington's plan to topple Assad and plunge Syria in failed-state anarchy. That strategy has now been rolled back, not by people waving signs in the streets or politicians appealing for peace and sanity, or diplomats at the UN "talking shop" who have become the de facto rubber stamp for US aggression. No. US policy was rolled back by Russian warplanes, heavy artillery, armored vehicles and highly-motivated, stiff-neck fighting grunts who put their country before their own personal safety. Get the picture?

For the last 15 years, the US has ruled the world through force of arms. Well, guess what; other people have weapons too, and they're ready to use them. That's the meaning of Kuweires. Other nations are refusing to accept a model of global world disorder where one country unilaterally arms, trains and deploys homicidal jihadi psychopaths to achieve its own narrow geopolitical goals. That's a model that is seriously broken and needs to be replaced ASAP. This is the task to which Putin and his fellow terror-liquidators have applied themselves, and they're doing a pretty fair job of it too.

In the last week, the Russian-led coalition has made great strides in ending this madness and turning the tide on the imperial project. As a result, Washington has been forced to rethink its approach and adapt to the rapidly-changing conditions on the ground. The evidence of this is everywhere, like this goofy article which ran at Huffington Post on Thursday. Check it out:

"Supported by U.S.-led airstrikes, Kurdish Iraqi troops on Thursday seized part of a highway that is used as a vital supply line by the Islamic State group, a key initial step in a major offensive to retake the strategic town of Sinjar from the militants...

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Mike is a freelance writer living in Washington state.

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