By Dave Lindorff
I'm going to engage here in a thought experiment which may make some readers a little queasy, but bear with me.
It's been half a century since the wrenching experience of having a charismatic young president cut down by bullets in what most Americans apparently still believe was a dark conspiracy by elements of the US government unhappy with the direction he was taking the country in international affairs.
Certainly powerful people like ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles and some of the nation's top generals, not to mention executives of what prior President Dwight D. Eisenhower had labeled the military industrial complex were outraged that in his third year in office Kennedy was trying to dial back the Cold War, to reduce or even end the threat of actual nuclear war, and that he was even thinking of pulling US troops out of Vietnam and of reaching some accommodation with Fidel Castro's Cuba.
Today we can read analyses like this that compellingly argue that the assassination of President Kennedy was orchestrated by those in the ruling elite who opposed such moves towards peace by a president who had campaigned for office as a hard-line cold warrior.
What then are we to make of recent actions by President Obama, who since his election has been a supporter of aggressive, even criminally aggressive militarism in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, but who, in recent months has been taking steps that appear, at least on their face, to be aimed at tamping down American belligerence?
Take his surprising back-down from a threatened attack on Syria. That prospective war at one point was only two days from being launched, with US ships and planes in place surrounding Syria, all fueled, armed and awaiting orders from the commander in chief.
Hawks in the Pentagon, CIA and the President's own National Security Council, and the Israeli government and its US lobby, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) were pushing hard a US air attack on the government and the military of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, along with direct military support for the Islamic militants battling his regime. Then suddenly, in an address to the nation, the president did a volte-face and announced that he was backing a Russian peace initiative that called for an internationally supervised program to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. The Neocons in Washington erupted in fury that their latest war was aborted. Their rage was echoed by AIPAC and by Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This peace move was followed by another shocker: the temporary six-month nuclear agreement just negotiated between a US-led group of six nations (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), and Iran...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new uncompromising four-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2055
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