Making Friends and Influencing People
"President [Barack] Obama has made clear that should diplomacy fail, force might be necessary to deter and degrade Assad's capacity to deliver these weapons."That's odd, it has the look and the feel of a game. A political game of such farcical dimensions that it's hard to find a note of serious conscience anywhere in there. On the one side there is the Realpolitik of two countries jockeying for advantage for their client states, and on the other there are the hostages whose fate has stricken the world, but evidently not enough to find some measure of comfort for them, circumstances abandoning them to their fate.
"The world watches closely whether the Assad regime lives up to its promise to give up chemical weapons. The words of the Syrian regime are simply not enough. This is not a game."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry
The very vulnerable population whose plight has arrested the attention of the world as it observes yet another flaunting of human rights to life and liberty with the mass slaughter of men, women and children made all the more appalling that the slaughter is being conducted by their very own government, has the world looking once again away in shame as it is simultaneously drawn to the venal display of cruelty by a regime committing mass atrocities.
As Rwanda did to its hapless Tutsi population, and Sudan did to Darfur, all the peacekeeping troops and pleas and threats by the United Nations accomplished nothing. More Cambodias and Democratic Republic of Congos will occur unfailingly as human nature turns its brute face against the helpless vulnerability of minorities, tribal animosities and religious persecution.
But on this specific occasion, Russia has a solution right at hand with Sergey Lavrov, Russian foreign minister speaking of a Security Council resolution to relax the iron fist of war into a limp hand of peace.
Drunk with the success of having backed the U.S. president into the trap portraying him as the warmonger and Vladimir Putin as the peace activist whose adventurous forays into Afghanistan, Chechnya and Georgia are now distant history awaiting renewal elsewhere, the Russian president couldn't resist the opportunity to use the American press to condescendingly inform Americans that they're not nearly as exceptional as Russian citizens whose president can wrangle alligators, deep-sea dive, tranquilize tigers and bears, and fly with cranes.
"The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. There is every reason to believe it [chemical weapons] was used not by the Syrian Army but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists", he wrote, apprising the American public how utterly gullible their president is to be taken in by such a shallow scheme, so readily interpreted for the folly it represents.
A callow, impressionable American president, and a wise, worldly, experienced Russian leader.
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| US secretary of state John Kerry (L) and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov give a joint press conference in Geneva. |
Mr. Putin's triumphalist tone did not endear him to Americans. The Republican senator John McCain who ran once for the presidency of the United States felt the tone of the article represented "an insult to the intelligence of every American." When they toss that issue of The New York Times, they can fumigate the breakfast table that held it for scrutiny.
"Putin probably had his best day as president in years ... and I suspect he's enjoying himself right now", commented Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. As for Mr. Putin? Chortling all the way. Just another one of his escapades.
Seems he also plays a hard game of chess.
Labels: Chemical Weapons, Conflict, Defence, Intervention, Russia, Syria, United States
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, September 14, 2013
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