Speaking to George Stephanopoulos — in regard to Syria’s Use of Chemical Weapons — President Obama’s Responses Were as Superficially Coherent as Weak Critical Thinking Skills Can Make Them — which Prompts the Question, “What is the Commander in Chief Really Up to?”

© 2013 Peter Free

 

15 September 2013

 

 

Citation — to interview with President Obama

 

This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Obama Rejects Criticism of Shifting Syria Policy: ‘I’m Less Concerned About Style Points’, ABC News (15 September 2013) (embedded video)

 

 

My theme — For the most part, when prominent American political leaders’ lips are moving, they are either lying, being stupid, or (occasionally) magnificently subtle

 

What follows is a mini examination of smoke and mirrors in American politics, using George Stephanopoulos’ interview of President Obama as an example.

 

President Obama said that he is more concerned with “getting the policy right,” than with looking good doing it.  But his presidency has been mostly based on looking politically and self-profitably good in the short run, rather than being strategically good for the nation in the long.

 

Anyone with the ability to think critically can dissect the President’s responses to Stephanopoulos and detect the self-serving hypocrisy and/or inept thinking that underlies them.

 

One can then ask, “Whose interests is the President actually attempting to serve?”

 

The answer is not clear.  And one of the possibilities may surprise you.

 

 

What President Obama said

 

In response to questions about America’s Syria policy:

 

 

The United States can’t get in the middle of somebody else’s civil war . . . .

 

What we can do is make sure that the worst of weapons, the indiscriminate weapons that don’t discriminate between a soldier and an infant, are not used.

 

The chemical weapons issue is the issue that I’m concerned about first and foremost.  That speaks directly to US interests.

 

It speaks to the potential that other countries start producing more chemical weapons, that the ban on chemical weapons unravels, and it becomes more accessible to terrorists, which in turn could be used against us.

 

This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Obama Rejects Criticism of Shifting Syria Policy: ‘I’m Less Concerned About Style Points’, ABC News (15 September 2013) (extracts beginning at 03:23 and 09:18 minutes into the video clip)

 

 

When one attempts to draw distinctions that facts do not support, one loses credibility

 

Dismantling the President’s logic is easy:

 

(1) Since when does a tank or artillery shell, exploding in an apartment complex, discriminate between soldiers and infants?

 

With reportedly at least 100,000 Syrians already dead by these indiscriminating conventional means, the President’s attempt to conceptualize the 1,400 dead due to President Assad’s use of gas as an even more horrible horror is a weak one.

 

(2) How is the limited strike that the President has proposed, leaving President Assad in power, going to dissuade other nations from increasing the chemical agent production that he fears?

 

(3) Why does Assad’s use of chemical weapons increase the likelihood that terrorists will get hold of them?

 

Presumably, most terrorists — located in places where the gas weapons are used — are going to be dead or out of commission.

 

One might just as well reason that the terrorists are more likely to successfully capture unused stockpiles of gas — because those stockpiles’ ordinary supply of soldier defenders is out in the field, fighting the rebellion with conventional means.

 

(4) How are the terrorists going to attack the United States with chemical weapons — any more successfully and “awfully” than they might with conventional, radioactive, or ordinarily poisonous means?

 

The President’s reasoning is so questionable, as to be silly.

 

So, what is this intelligent man actually up to?

 

 

What the President is really doing — serving himself, his cronies, or us?

 

His two presidential terms in evidence, President Obama cares almost exclusively about two things:

 

(1) looking good politically — which in international affairs means preventing America’s lunatic right from undercutting his credentials for eagerly fisting America’s adversaries

 

and

 

(2) staying on good terms with the plutocratic people and institutions that run the country.

 

In Syria’s case, both impulses motivate our Commander in Chief’s vacuous insistence that American interests mandate an unworkably limited response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

 

By going in this war-mongering direction, the President defuses the Right’s ability to call him a Kenyan “pussy”, and he simultaneously wins plaudits from America’s avaricious Military Industrial Complex, which profits from the supply chains that go into supporting these strolls into the Park of Death.  There is a good deal of money to made in getting people killed, whatever the reason.

 

 

BUT — there is another explanation that could support President Obama’s claimed virtue

 

It is possible that the Commander in Chief recognized that effectuating Russian influence in Syria is necessary, so as to ameliorate President Assad’s murderous reign.

 

President Obama may have reasoned that believably threatening American military intervention might have been necessary to get President Putin off his dead behind.  Lighting the Syrian powder keg would destabilize Russia’s influence in Syria.

 

Russia has more to lose in Syria than we do.  And Russia will be equally threatened by the chaos that might result from tossing a bomb into an explosively unpredictable situation.

 

By positing believable (but rationally erroneous) reasons for an American intervention — President Obama may have wanted Putin to believe that he is just dumb enough to torch the remnants of Middle Eastern stability on the very hypocritical grounds that Putin attacked in a New York Times article.

 

Make your enemy think you are stupider and more violent than you really are — and force him to counter with the exact move that you wanted him to make all along.

 

Clever.

 

 

The moral? — When somebody’s logic makes little or no sense, they are up to something that they do not want us to see

 

In this case, President Obama may be acting as short-sightedly and self-servingly as he characteristically has.

 

Or he may be pulling off a genuinely inspired leadership move, which may ultimately reduce the Syrian death toll.