Behind Obama's "Chaotic" Foreign Policy

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/57795/behind-obamas-chaotic-foreign-policy

Behind Obama's "Chaotic" Foreign Policy
by Robert Parry | August 22, 2014 - 8:08am

President Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been disjointed and even incoherent because he has – since taking office in 2009 – pursued conflicting strategies, mixing his own penchant for less belligerent “realism” with Official Washington’s dominant tough-guy ideologies of neoconservatism and its close cousin, “liberal interventionism.”

What this has meant is that Obama often has acted at cross-purposes, inclined to cooperate with sometimes adversaries like Russia on pragmatic solutions to thorny foreign crises, such as Syria’s chemical weapons and Iran’s nuclear program, but other times stoking these and other crises by following neocon demands that he adopt aggressive tactics against Russia, Syria, Iran and other “enemies.”

So, we have Obama covertly arming Syrian rebels, many of whom were interchangeable with Islamic jihadists, but then sending the U.S. military back into Iraq to fight some of these same extremists who spilled back into Iraq, the country where they got their start after President George W. Bush’s neocon-inspired invasion.

~snip~

But at the core of Obama’s muddled foreign policy is his unwillingness to challenge the prime sources of Middle Eastern instability, traditional U.S. “allies”: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Those two countries feed the violence across the region, Israel through its brutality toward the Palestinians – providing a recruiting bonanza for Islamic extremists – and Saudi Arabia via its covert funding for jihadists.

[CJCRANE]

1. IMO the neocons coopted Cameron, Hollande, Merkel

as well as key US politicians and administration officials (plus of course our allies in the ME).

They planted the dragon's teeth during Obama's first term which set in motion the events we're seeing today.

[grahamhgreen]

2. Nail meet head.