by Eric Zuesse
December 31, 2014
from
BlackListedNews Website
He
asserts:
"wherever we have been involved
over the last several years, I think the outcome has been
better because of American leadership."
U.S. President
Barack Obama said in a December 30th
Oval Office
interview with
Steve Inskeep of
National Public Radio, that,
"wherever we
have been involved over the last several years, I think the
outcome has been better because of American leadership."
This statement
from him was part of his answer when Inskeep asked whether the
President had regrets about,
"overthrowing
the Gadhafi regime" in Libya.
Obama answered:
"We are hugely
influential; we're the one 'indispensable' nation. But when it
comes to nation-building, when it comes to what is going to be a
generational project in a place
like Libya or a
place like Syria
or a place like Iraq, we can help, but we can't do it for them."
In other words: the
Libyan people failed, and the Syrian people failed, and the Iraqi
people failed, according to America's President - but he himself and
his predecessor
Bush did not fail by bombing
those countries under false pretenses as they did.
Obama then pivoted into
a direct criticism of Russia's President,
Vladimir Putin.
He started his attack
here by praising himself for,
"having some
strategic patience. You'll recall that three or four months ago,
everybody in Washington was convinced that President Putin was a
genius."
Obama was suggesting
that the real genius was himself, for his "strategic
patience."
Inskeep, who apparently
was ignorant that
the people of Crimea had always opposed the donation of Crimea from
Russia to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954,
and who was also ignorant that Crimeans in March 2014 were delighted
to be reunited again with Russia and had not been "taken" by Russia
but were instead saved by Russia from
the fate that befell Donbass,
interjected, there, that Obama meant that Putin was thought to be a
"genius" "for taking Crimea."
Inskeep was here trying
to clarify Obama's reference by the "genius" term; and, in doing so,
Inskeep falsely assumed that Crimea had been seized, against the
will of Crimeans.
The President
skillfully built upon Inskeep's ignorance, and anti-Russian bias,
here, by playing along with Inskeep's false intrinsic assumption,
and by continuing directly from it in such a way as to present
himself as being the real "genius", he asserted,
"And he had
outmaneuvered all of us and he had, you know, bullied and, you
know, strategized his way into expanding Russian power.
And I said at the
time we don't want war with Russia - even though his
February 2014
anti-Russian coup in Ukraine and
actions afterwards
show otherwise - but we can apply steady pressure working with
our European partners, being the backbone of an international
coalition to oppose Russia's violation of another country's
sovereignty - as if it weren't the case that
two recent Gallup polls in Crimea
showed an overwhelming public support there for leaving Ukraine
and for reuniting with Russia, and as if it weren't the case
that America's takeover of Ukraine on Russia's border hadn't
been the aggressive act here - and that over time, this would be
a strategic mistake by Russia - when, in fact, Obama knows quite
well that the people he installed in his February coup in
Ukraine had already been initiating the process to kick out of
Crimea, Russia's crucial Black Sea Fleet, which had been
stationed there since 1783, and that this reversal of
Khrushchev's 1954 gift of Crimea to Ukraine was crucial for
Russia's own national security.
And today, you
know, I'd sense that at least outside of Russia - such as among
the trusting listeners to NPR
- maybe some people are thinking what Putin did wasn't so smart
- when Obama knows quite well that what Putin did by his
re-absorbing Crimea back into Russia was actually vital to
Russian national security under the circumstances of Obama's
February coup in Ukraine."
Inskeep responded to
Obama's distortions, with what he perhaps hoped his listeners would
think to be a challenging question to the President:
"Are you just lucky
that the price of oil went down and therefore their currency
collapsed or… is it something that you did?"
Inskeep was apparently
quite ignorant there that Obama's Secretary of State had
met in Riyadh with the Saudi King on
September 11th widely viewed as having actually
produced the King's decision to flood oil markets in order to drive
oil prices so low as to cripple Russia's economy, so that Inskeep's
question here was assuming a non-existent polarity, in any case
(between the sanctions from Obama, vs. the falling oil-price, which
was supposedly not from Obama).
Obama answered
Inskeep's ignorance there by triumphantly bragging against Putin:
"If you'll recall,
their economy was already contracting and capital was fleeing
even before oil collapsed. And part of our rationale in this
process was that the only thing keeping that economy afloat was
the price of oil.
[Actually, Russia's
economy under Putin had been
growing much faster than
had the U.S. economy under the George W. Bush
and Barack Obama regime.]
And if, in fact, we
were steady in applying sanction pressure, which we have been,
that over time it would make the economy of Russia sufficiently
vulnerable that if and when there were disruptions with respect
to the price of oil - which, inevitably, there are going to be
sometime, if not this year then next year or the year after
[which also is a lie from him because the current low oil price
is the engineered price, and even the Saudis will have to quit
doing it within a few years] - that they'd have enormous
difficulty managing it.
I say that, not to
suggest that we've solved Ukraine [by producing the civil war
there?], but I'm saying that to give an indication that when it
comes to the international stage, these problems are big,
they're difficult, they're messy [like
America's coups were in
Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, etc.]
But wherever we
have been involved over the last several years, I think the
outcome has been better because of American leadership."
So, the particular
instance in which America's President feels proudest of having
produced an "outcome [that] has been better because of American
leadership" was in Ukraine, where Obama's policy produced a takeover
of the Ukrainian Government by racist anti-Russian fascists, or
Nazis who hate Russians - Nazis who are ethnically cleansing ethnic
Russians
away from Ukraine's Donbass
region, the region that had
voted 90% for the President,
Viktor Yanukovych,
whom Obama had overthrown
with the crucial armed muscle of those Nazi snipers who carried out
his coup.
(And virtually no U.S.
'news' medium has reported that
the actual person whom Obama
placed in control of Ukraine is a longstanding leader of Ukraine's
nazis.)
With 'news'
coverage like this, it's clear why, as Gallup headlined on December
29th, "Barack
Obama, Hillary Clinton Extend Run as Most Admired."
That sort of thing -
respect for people who are actually war-mongers - has become routine
in the United States.
-
In 2001, the most-admired man was George W.
Bush, and the most-admired woman was his wife.
-
In 2002-2006, the most-admired man was
President Bush, and the most-admired woman was former
President Bill Clinton's wife.
Source
(Hillary
Clinton is
a big backer of all invasions
and coups by the U.S.)
And, without 'news'
coverage like that, it's also clear why people outside the United
States consider the U.S. to be
the biggest threat to
world peace. Internationally, Russia is way down
this list.
However, America's
President won't need to ask those foreigners whether
to launch a nuclear attack
against Russia.
All that he will need
to control is America's press - and he (and the aristocrats who
placed him into power) do.
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