After US blood and treasure expended in Iraq – 9 years of war, hundreds of billions of dollars, and 4,500 American dead – what is to stop ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) from overrunning the whole of Iraq? Iraq has 250,000 frontline troops, 270 aircraft including drones, 130 helicopters, and 400 tanks. Yet a mere 7,000 lightly armed ISIS fighters have caused the whole State to implode in a matter of days. But it is not only the fantasy of a viable Iraq which has suddenly collapsed like a pack of cards, it has triggered a tremor that is shaking the whole Middle East region and beyond that the geopolitics of US power. Continue reading
Tagged with Barack Obama
Is Russia now in charge of Middle East policy?
The US has been comprehensively outmanoeuvred over Syria.
First, the Commons vote induced Obama to seek a vote in Congress to shore up his authority to take military action against the background that US public opinion shared UK public opinion in resisting any further intervention in the Middle East.
Then as uncertainty grew about the vote in the House of Representatives, he grasped eagerly at the lifeline thrown him by the Russian proposal that the Syrian chemical weapons sites be placed under international control. Continue reading
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The West is too riddled with self interest to lead on Syria or other world affairs
Obama’s key line that the attack on Syria would be a short, surgical strike was designed to win over those who were appalled at Assad’s (virtually certain) use of chemical weapons and wanted him to be punished, but without risk of another long war. His latest deviation from this line – that the missile strike is part of a wider scenario leading to regime change in Damascus – was designed to win over key Republican leaders in order to help win the Congressional vote next week, but it will inevitably alarm and turn off those in the first category. Continue reading
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Obama could yet make New Labour’s mistake
MOST liberal post-mortems of the US presidential contest have been pretty upbeat; many comfortingly assert that the Republicans can never win again.
The GOP is said to be irretrievably out of sync with the new America of openly lesbian senators, women who know their bodies cannot shut down rape pregnancies, and ever-increasing numbers of Latinos with no plans to ‘self-deport’ any time soon. Continue reading
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Lessons from Obama’s victory
It’s not simply that Obama won, nor even that he won by a far larger margin than the media (ever eager to exaggerate electoral uncertainty to increase newspaper sales) had predicted. It’s the small print of the election which is so interesting. Social liberalism prevailed over hardline conservatism. Continue reading