Obama finesses the chaos that Middle East "allies" wreak

Bull's Eye !  
How is it possible that some see things so clearly while most others talk and walk around lost and disoriented?  Can people be so willingly blind and stupid?

Robert Parry writing at ConsortiumNews:
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.....

..........And, we have Obama needing Russia’s assistance to resolve the crises with Syria, Iraq and Iran but letting his foreign policy team alienate Russian President Vladimir Putin by stoking a confrontation over a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, which has seen the U.S. State Department weaving a false narrative that blames Putin for instigating the conflict when he was clearly reacting to provocations from the West. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Powerful Group Think on Ukraine.”]  

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.

However, because Israel and Saudi Arabia get a pass on much of what they do – and Israel in particular wields extraordinary influence over the U.S. political/media process – Obama has typically tried to finesse the chaos that these “allies” wreak.

Here is also where the neocons and the “liberal interventionists” come into the picture. They demand that Obama react to “humanitarian” crises in disfavored countries, especially those on Israel’s “regime change” list, like Iran and Syria.

Official Washington put a big black hat on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and white hats on the rebels fighting to overthrow him despite the fact that the notion of “moderate” rebels was always a myth – as even Obama has acknowledged – and despite the gradual.............