Barack Obama’s Staggering Incompetence (The Saker reprints "Commentary" editorial!!)

Today I am going to do something I never imaged I would even remotely contemplate: I am going to reprint an article by, I kid you not, Commentary.  Yeah, I am on their mailing list because I like to keep an eye on the crazies, but today, for the first time ever, I read a full editorial of theirs and I can only agree with every word.  So here goes, ready?  The Saker reprints "Commentary" editorial!! (red color added)
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Barack Obama’s Staggering Incompetence

by Peter Wehner for Commentary:

It’s reported that President Obama was ready to order a military strike against Syria, with or without Congress’s blessing, but “on Friday night, he suddenly changed his mind.” According to the Huffington Post:

Senior administration officials describing Obama’s about-face Saturday offered a portrait of a president who began to wrestle with his own decision – at first internally, then confiding his views to his chief of staff, and finally summoning his aides for an evening session in the Oval Office to say he’d had a change of heart.

In light of all this, it’s worth posing a few questions:

1. Why didn’t the president seek congressional authority before the administration began to beat the war drums this past week? Did the idea not occur to him? It’s not as if this is an obscure issue. When you’re in the White House and preparing to launch military force against a sovereign nation, whether or not to seek the approval of Congress is usually somewhere near the top of the to-do list.

And why has the urgency to act that we saw from the administration during the last week–when Assad’s use of chemical weapons was referred to by the secretary of state as a “moral obscenity”–given way to an air of casualness, with Obama not even calling Congress back into session to debate his military strike against Syria?

2. The president didn’t seek congressional approval for his military strike in Libya. Why does he believe he needs it in Syria?

3. Mr. Obama, in his Rose Garden statement on Saturday, still insisted he has the authority to strike Syria without congressional approval. So what happens if Congress votes down a use-of-force resolution? Does the president strike Syria anyway? If so, will it be an evanescent bombing, intended to be limited in scope and duration, while doing nothing to change the war’s balance of power? Or does the president completely back down? Does he even know? Has he thought through in advance anything related to Syria? Or is this a case of Obama simply making it up as he goes along?

This latest volte-face by the president is evidence of a man who is completely overmatched by events, weak and confused, and deeply ambivalent about using force. Yet he’s also desperate to get out of the corner he painted himself into by declaring that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would constitute a “red line.” As a result he’s gone all Hamlet on us. Not surprisingly, Obama’s actions are being mocked by America’s enemies and sowing doubt among our allies. (Read this New York Times story for more.)

What explains this debacle? It’s impossible for us to know all the reasons, but one explanation appears to be a CYA operation.

According to Politico, “At the very least, Obama clearly wants lawmakers to co-own a decision that he can’t back away from after having declared last year that Assad would cross a ‘red line’ if he used chemical weapons against his own people.” And the Washington Post reports:

Obama’s proposal to invite Congress dominated the Friday discussion in the Oval Office. He had consulted almost no one about his idea. In the end, the president made clear he wanted Congress to share in the responsibility for what happens in Syria. As one aide put it, “We don’t want them to have their cake and eat it, too.”

Get it? The president of the United States is preparing in advance to shift the blame if his strike on Syria proves to be unpopular and ineffective. He’s furious about the box he’s placed himself in, he hates the ridicule he’s (rightly) incurring, but he doesn’t see any way out.

What he does see is a political (and geopolitical) disaster in the making. And so what is emerging is what comes most naturally to Mr. Obama: Blame shifting and blame sharing. Remember: the president doesn’t believe he needs congressional authorization to act. He’s ignored it before. He wants it now. For reasons of political survival. To put it another way: He wants the fingerprints of others on the failure in Syria.

Rarely has an American president joined so much cynicism with so much ineptitude.

Ron Paul and M K Bhadrakumar both believe that this is Obama's "Monica moment"

According to Ron Paul and M K Bhadrakumar all this nonsense about chemical weapons in Syria has nothing to do with Syria, but it is simply about the creation of a distraction away from Obama's internal problems (Ron Paul here;  M K Bhadrakumar here).  Unsuprisingly, Russia has categorically rejected the chemical weapons claim, the arming of the rebels or the possible imposition of an illegal no-fly zone:


It certainaly appears to me like this is yet another all-American "CF-CYA" in the making.

The Saker

"CF->CYA" - the magic formula of the Empire of Illusions

Well, it sure looks like the United States of Amnesia have rapidly recovered from the use of a so-called "weapon of mass destruction" (a pressure cooked) in Boston and has turned to more important topics like Angelina Jolie's breasts.

And yet, the official narrative is being challenged by so many facts that it is really worth at taking a short look at it.

There was already the Hollywood-like one billion dollar per day lockdown of Boston which managed not to find a severely wounded and bleeding teenager which, as soon as the neighborhood he was in was declared "checked", was found by a private citizen. There was the photos of the naked but otherwise totally healthy Tamerlan Tsarnaev formally recognized by his mother which were shot in the exact location which the cops were searching and which were dismissed by the FBI as "coincidence".  Instead, the cops declared that Tamerlan had been shot and run over by, no, not by cops, but by his younger brother Dzhokhar.  There was the "yes, the Russians did warn us "zig" followed by the "but they gave us no actionable intelligence "zag" episode.  Then, after the eventual capture of the young Dzhokhar, there was the "he has confessed" statement by the FBI contradicted by Dzhokhar's parents ("he cannot speak, how can he confess?!").

Then the action shifted to Orlando, Florida, where a friend of the Tsarnaev brothers - Ibragim Todashev - who, after being interrogated by 4 armed FBI agents suddenly attacked them with his bare hands and got shot six times, including one bullet in the back of his head.  Unsurprisingly, his father now claims that he son was executed.

In the meantime, the two FBI agents who arrested Tsarnaev were taken by helicopter 12 miles off the US coast were they both "fell out" of the FBI helicopter and died.  Later, official sources denied that these two special agents had participated in the Tsarnaev arrest.  (They did not explain what exactly the FBI special agents were doing right on the limit of the US territorial waters though or how they "fell out"...).

Still, bad luck seems to strike "arresting" agents of the US government.  Remember how 22 of the 23 members of the SEAL team who "killed" Bin Laden then all died in a helicopter accident in Afghanistan? That would leave one alive?  Nope - Nicolas D. Checque died in combat December 2012, also in Afghanistan.  That is 23/23.

Ok, some of the info above might be false, based on rumors, uncorroborated or outright fabricated.  That is the problem when everything is classified "secret" - it does not leave the general public many means to find out the truth other than, of course, simply accepting the official narrative.

As for Uncle Shmuel and his hyper-subservient corporate media, they simply deny it all, but without giving any substantiation to their denials.

Take the (immediately forgotten) case of the "lost nuclear warheads and series of  mysterious deaths in the USAF".  Or the most convenient death of the most inconvenient WTC7 witness, Barry Jennings.  I won't even go into the Kennedy assassinations.

Personally, and unlike in the case of the 9/11 events which were clearly the result of an 'inside job" and  controlled demolitions, I don't necessarily see a big conspiracy in the Boston bombings case.  This looks to me like an all-American specialty: a "CF" (clusterf**ck) followed by a desperate attempt to "CYA" (cover your *ss).  In the case of the SEAL team which supposedly killed Bin Laden, this looks more suspicious to me, if only because I am convinced that OBL died in 2004 (several Russian officials - including the very well-informed head of the State Duma's international affairs committee, Sergei Pushkov,  - have confirmed this).  And yet it looks that something or somebody was involved in a firefight in Abbottabad.  Probably not OBL himself, but somebody did return fire and was killed.  And the assault team did make a determined effort to clean up the place from key evidence before leaving the place.  So something happened that night, and all (most?) the key witnesses are dead.  Maybe just to protect them from retaliation, but maybe not.  I don't know.

The same "CF->CYA" model is now being implemented in preparation of the (very partial) US withdrawal from Afghanistan.  If that topic interests you, I highly recommend the superb documentary "This Is What Winning Looks Like" in three parts on Youtube.

None of this is very surprising, really, the USA has truly become an "Empire of Illusions" (to borrow Chris Hedges excellent expression).  Or think of recent Presidents: if beyond any doubt the Presidency of Baby Bush could be summarized as a massive "CF", is Obama's presidency an endless exercise in "CYA"?

Now think of the situation in Syria?  Remember how, two years ago, Uncle Shmuel have Assad just a couple of month?  And then how all the Takfiri crazies from Libya naturally moved from "conquered" Libya into Mali and, mostly, Syria.  And now that the situation looks really dangerous, Kerry is coming to Moscow with a contrite smile on his face, and speaks about the Geneva Accords while the insurgency, the EU and Congress want nothing to do with any peace conference at all.  What is this if not a grand "CF->CYA" operation?

This "CF->CYA" is literally all over the policies of Uncle Shmuel and his corporate nightmare.  Nothing works out as planned and, just as a person stuck in quicksands, each effort to "CYA" only makes the situation worse and worse and worse and worse again.

This model really extends far beyond the borders of the USA, it also is the key formula to understand the policies of the USA's western colonies (aka "Europe).  There is, of course, the iconic example of Mr. Hollande, the most incompetent, passive or, to use a most appropriate expression, flaccid French President ever.  I have no idea where they found this guy, but I don't think I have ever seen somebody so comprehensively clueless at the helm of a country with a 1'500 year old history and nuclear weapons.  And what does Mr. Hollande do with this time?  Yup, "CF-CYA" of course!  And its not only him.  It is the entire EU which looks like The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.  Having "successfully" mugged Cyprus, they are now seriously considering using the same trick elsewhere in the EU.

This would all be funny if it did not spread death and chaos all over the planet.  For an Empire fully centered on illusions, consequences on the ground really don't matter.  As long as CNN says it is a success, it is a success.  The illusion becomes the goal.  And as long as the consequences of these illusions are not shown on TV, they do not really exist.  Simple and neat.

Orwell would be proud.

The Saker