Looking at Obama’s last days in office one could not help but remember the famous line written by William Shakespeare: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
It seems that only now the Obama administration has gotten hold of the fact that the Democrats have lost the election and they won’t be around in the next four years to boss people around. At the same time, the next administration is not simply planning to adjust the policies that were pursued by Barack Obama, it’s going to radically change them. Against this backdrop, the still sitting US President has changed the approach to his successor so radically that it looks like he’s in a static of panic.
The most striking example is the recent UN Security Council, where the United States, much to everyone’s surprise, failed to veto a resolution that would condemn Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. At this point, a Former Congressman and radio talk show host Joe Walsh said that Barack Obama must be a secret Muslim, since it’s the only reasonable explanation of the unexpected hard stance that Washington has taken on Israel.
However, it didn’t take long for a total of 342 congressmen of the US House of Representatives to rebuke the United Nations for passing a resolution that condemned Israeli settlement construction, a bipartisan slap that also targets the Obama administration. Some Republicans even threatened to introduce a bill that would force Washington to stop financing the UN.
Further still, the position that the Obama administration has taken on the alleged Russia’s inference in the US presidential election was equally unbalanced. After all, even the sitting CIA director, John Brennan in his interview for PBS noted that there’s a real chance that a totally different state was trying to meddle in the 2016 presidential campaign. It’s curious that all US intelligence agencies have been searching for evidence that a hat a country which has had its economy “being torn to shreds” was able to rig the election in the US day in, day out. Nevertheless, all that they could provide was empty allegations with not a single piece of evidence being provided, which is getting a little old now. Even the fact that US intelligence agencies are spying on pretty much every single political leader in this world, going as far as tapping the cell phones of Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, was of little help.
However, the Obama camp is far from being being unanimous. Just the other day Defense Secretary Ash Carter told The Wall Street Journal that Russia has done nothing to help defeat Islamic State forces in Syria. It seems that this “politician” never reads newspapers, while preferring to get all the news and instructions from Barack Obama directly. However, on the next day, US Secretary of State John Kerry stated the complete opposite, noting that Russia and Iran opposed ISIS in their effort to support Damascus and have even achieved significant progress in this domain.
This is not the first time that the State Department and Pentagon provide completely different assessments of certain situations, thereby displaying the chaos that reigns in the Obama administration. It’s curious that it was Syria that became a sort of bone of contention for State Department and Pentagon, since those bodies were eager to demonstrate “their own success”, which resulted in Washington being left with no say whatsoever on the Syrian reconciliation negotiations that are taking place in Astana.
In a bid to somehow sweeten the bitter pill that Barack Obama is about to take, the Department of Defense decided to pull a trick out of the old USSR gamebook by awarding Obama with a medal “Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service”. A stirring ceremony that would definitely be a treat for some crazed Soviet leader was conducted Ashton Carter, General Joseph Dunford, and a number of members of the presidential cabinet. Among the achievements of the sitting US president that were announced at the ceremony one could spot something so utterly delusional as the commitment to modernization of the armed forces and the fight against terrorism.
However, none of those present dared to recall that during Obama’s two terms in office hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance were dropped on the Middle East and Africa, killing thousands of civilians. Last year alone the United States dropped more than 26 thousand tons of bombs on such states as Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, says the latest report of the US Council on Foreign Relations,
No one dared to mention the failures of that plagued the most advanced US military projects, like the notoriously bad F-35 and new warships, which fail with a remarkable level of consistency.
Finally, the Pentagon has found its hero to honor, its Nobel Peace Prize to glorify. We now wait for an international court, which will have to uncover the real “achievements” of this “hero”.
Therefore, Obama is more nervous these days than ever, while trying to cover up the traces of his disastrous reign. He hurries to the “pardon” the hostages of the Guantanamo prison before Donald Trump gets inaugurated, sending at least four prisoners to Saudi Arabia, as it’s been noted by the Fox News. It got to the point where experts of the Wikileaks portal publicly announce their fears that the White House is planning erase some of its electronic archives in a bid to evade prosecution.
Yes, Obama’s agony, just like the collapse of the “system” he created, is entering the terminal phase.
Grete Mautner is an indepenent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
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