Can Obama Level with the People?

I'm told that these tragedies became propaganda weapons to deploy against Assad, Yanukovych and Putin rather than horrific crimes that deserved serious investigation and accountability. But whatever the ultimate conclusion about who is to blame for these crimes, why has Obama withheld from the American people what U.S. intelligence analysts know about those three incidents?

It was Obama, after all, who talked so much about "transparency" and trusting the American people as a candidate and during his first days in office. But since then, he has conformed to the elitist Orwellian approach of managing our perceptions rather than giving us the facts.

Yet, if Obama could get his cooperation with Putin back on track -- recognizing how useful it was in 2013 when Putin helped Obama get Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons and assisted in wresting important concessions from Iran about its nuclear program -- then the two powers could also weigh in on securing a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, another major irritant to peace in the region.

Indeed, it appears that the possibility of Obama and Putin working together to force the Israelis to make meaningful concessions for peace was a factor in the neocon determination to turn an eminently manageable political dispute in Ukraine -- over the pace of its integration into Europe without rending its ties to Russia -- into the dangerous frontlines of a new Cold War.

The neocons and liberal hawks outmaneuvered Obama who fell in line with the Putin-bashing, all the better to fit within Official Washington's in-crowd.

Thus, the Syrian crisis was left to fester with Obama acquiescing to neocon/liberal-hawk demands for arming and training "moderate" rebels although the President recognized that the idea was a "fantasy." He also resisted some of the more extreme ideas, like an outright U.S. military invasion of Syria framed as a humanitarian "safe zone."

But the Paris tragedy is another reminder that it is well past time for Obama to resurrect his helpful relationship with Putin and restore the teamwork that held such promise toward settling conflicts through negotiations, along the lines of the Iran nuclear deal.

If Obama were to choose that route -- which could be implemented through a combination of truth-telling to the American people and pragmatic big-power diplomacy with Russia -- he could at least start addressing the underlying causes of the violence tearing apart the Middle East and now spreading into Europe.

Or will Obama's reaction to the Paris attacks be just more of the same -- more tough-guy talk about "resolve," more "targeted" killings that slaughter many innocents as "collateral damage," more tolerance of Saudi-Turkish-Qatari support for Sunni militants in Syria and elsewhere, more acceptance of hard-line Israeli repression of the Palestinians, more giving in to neocon/liberal-hawk demands for "regime change" in the neocons' preferred list of countries?

If the history of the past seven years is any guide, there's little doubt which direction President Obama will choose. He will go with Official Washington's flow; he'll worry about what the editorialists at the Post and Times might think of him; he'll accommodate the neocons and liberal hawks who remain influential inside his own administration. In short, he'll continue down the road toward destruction.