Barack Obama's Policy Confusions

http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=691

Barack Obama's Policy Confusions William Pfaff

Paris, August 13, 2014 – President Barack Obama, in the interview given last weekend to The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman (published in the International Edition on Monday), provided illumination on his foreign policy thinking, at this moment of fraught drama in both Iraq and Ukraine, but the counsels concerning the two didn’t match. The President made it clear that he does not intend to take the United States more deeply into the Middle East (again!) unless the Iraq authorities “agree to an inclusive policy of no victor/no vanquished.” He is not willing to provide an air force for one or another of the factions contending for power in Iraq, Mr. Friedman reported, although the air intervention now taking place has -- so far -- been to protect the Kurd, Christian, and Yazidi minorities that have been under assault by the self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate, new name for the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” Yet in Ukraine the United States is allied with and presumably counseling Ukrainian government forces that seem definitely set on vanquishing what remains of the pro-Russian separatists that currently hold Donetsk near the Russian border. Moreover, silence still surrounds the American and European Union roles in instigating last February’s government coup in Kiev, responsible for Russia’s retaliatory annexation of Crimea, and the uprising among the Russian-speaking community in eastern Ukraine that continues today. At the same time NATO insists that Russia has again moved a considerable number of troops to near the Ukraine border where the Russians say they are prepared to conduct a delivery of “humanitarian” goods, supervised by representatives of the International Red Cross. NATO claims this really may be a disguised invasion to reinforce the separatists now under government siege in and around the city of Donetsk, and has implied that any border crossing could mean war.http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=691