The question of how much Obama knew about Putin’s plans has become more prominent as presidential candidates Donald Trump, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen.
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In the interview Obama also addressed the faltering Syrian rebel training program saying, “there’s no doubt that it did not work”. “And what we’ve learned is that as long as Assad remains in power, it is very hard to get those folks to focus their attention on ISIL”.
The reason the USA has not had deep military involvement in Syria is out of design not failure, President Obama said on “60 Minutes“. President Putin “is challenging your leadership, Mr. President”, Kroft says.
That imperial impulse drove Putin to annex Crimea from Ukraine, and one of the Baltic states is “quite possibly next”, said Woolsey, who attributes Russia’s audacity partly to a USA administration that lacks the appetite to keep it in check.
He is accused of hijacking Russia from the ‘road to democracy’,as pursued by his grotesquely corrupt predecessor Boris Yeltsin; of directing the bloody repression of the ‘freedom loving Chechens’; of jailing innocent, independent and critical oligarchs and robber barons; of fomenting an uprising in the ‘democratic, newly pro-Western’Ukraine and seizing control of Crimea; of backing a ‘bloody tyrant’ in Syria (elected President Bashar Assad) in a civil war against ISIS terrorists; of running the Russian economy into the ground; and of militarily threatening the Baltic and Eastern European North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member countries. The president doubled down on this nonsensical claim in a “60 Minutes” interview with Steve Kroft broadcast on Sunday when he said Putin’s military mission in Syria is a sign of Russia’s weakness, not a show of Putin’s leadership.
As The Daily Beast reported just a few days ago, Russia’s actions appear to be substantially more than desperate flailing. That said, we don’t see Democrats right now thumping their chests about shooting Russian planes out of the sky and treating nuclear rivals like “any other adversary”. That’s a great example of the kind of leadership that will soon have the West pushed entirely out of the Middle East.
“That is not leadership for America around the world”, Christie said.
But Russian Federation is also expanding its influence in the Middle East by selling Iran a new surface-to-air missile system that it can use to defend its nuclear program.
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Kroft and Obama discuss domestic issues as well, including gun violence. While the Islamic State continues to steal, kill and destroy, and Putin is seizing land and bombing his way to becoming the world’s strong man, our president wants to saddle My Little Pony. “I think there’s no real way to change that probably without a change of administration, so we’re probably stuck with Obama’s approach, such as it is, for the next 15 months or so”. “I think that it was a mistake that she has acknowledged, and, you know, as a general proposition, when we’re in these offices, we have to be more sensitive and stay as far away from the line as possible when it comes to how we handle information, how we handle our own personal data”. They include Kerry, who has argued for establishing a no-fly zone in Syria, an option Obama recently suggested was “half-baked”. Ironically, it might just get others to follow our lead and make the political solution we seek more likely. Who doesn’t think Putin guffawed so hard he almost fell off his chair when he heard this? In any case, the cool quality that helped Obama win the presidency in 2008 has arguably dissipated. “She made a mistake”. She has acknowledged it. I do think that the way it’s been ginned-up is in part because of – in part – because of politics. This is by his design that the United States should not be playing a more advanced role there.
