Syrian Conflict: Putin rescues Obama from the brink of war

It looked as though there was no way out for President Barack Obama: Either he faced a humiliating defeat at a Congressional vote for military action, which would in effect render him a lame duck President, or enter a dark hole of an armed conflict against the Assad regime unable to know how it might end. Either chose potentially disastrous. And then, out of the blue America’s Secretary of State John Kerry makes an unguarded, unscripted comment that allowed Russia’s President Putin to save the day.

Kerry speaking in London with Britain’s Foreign Minister William Hague stated that,

Assad has a week to give up his chemical weapons, or else."

By the way, that was the type of rhetoric President George W Bush used before invading Iraq. It’s not really politics, rather political rhetoric, with the veneer that you are being fair.

But having made the comment, the Russians with the support of Assad’s Syrian regime tested it. ‘Okay’, they said, we’ll demand the Syrians give us all their chemical weapons’. Obama could not believe his luck: At this moment he has avoided a Congressional defeat, and or instructing his fighters to bomb Syria, with the added bonus of being able to say that ‘Syria was forced to do this because of his tough talking.’

During a conversation today that I had with Rev Jesse Jackson on his penultimate day in the UK, he told to me that:

Putin has turned midnight to midday, and pulled the super powers away from getting bogged down in a proxy war."

There’s no doubt that if the powers can go down the path of neutralising the chemical weapons, and investigating who fired the recent chemical weapons then the world would be more united in its response.

All this week the American and international ‘doves’ such as Rev Jackson, have been appealing for aggressive diplomacy. Up utill Putin’s intervention, the war mongering ‘Hawkes’ on Capital Hill have been winning the day.

It’s not over yet; the immediate rush to bomb Syria has been thwarted.

Simon Woolley