Aleppo: Obama’s legacy of shame

All decent men and women should condemn the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey. They should also condemn the deliberate mass bombing of Syrian civilians in Syria by troops under the command of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

All decent men and women around the world, and Democrats and Republicans across America, should condemn the shameful refusal of President Obama to take action that would have saved desperate and dying Syrians whose bloodstained corpses will be viewed by historians as a moral blot on his legacy, as I wrote last August in a column in The Hill.

Asked recently on MSNNC’s “Morning Joe” about Obama’s policy toward Syria, retired Adm. and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis said Obama will someday look back on his Syria policy “with deep sorrow and some shame.”

As the excellent story in The Hill about this comment correctly reported, Obama said in 2011 that Syrian dictator Assad must go. In the course of the Syrian civil war an estimated 470,000 Syrians have died and more than 11 million Syrians have become homeless.

{mosads}Throughout the years, as the carnage continued in Syria, Obama repeatedly opined about the evils of the killing while repeatedly refusing to take actions that could have ended it.

If Obama has the capacity to admit he was terribly wrong about anything, Stavridis is right and the president will someday look back in shame at the things he refused to do while the bloodshed continued.

In October, Secretary of State John Kerry, known to have long favored a stronger policy toward Syria than Obama, called for an international investigation of Syria and Russia for war crimes committed by Syrian and Russian bombing of civilians, which reportedly included the deliberate bombing of hospitals treating wounded and dying civilians.

Even then, Obama refused to act. Our European allies refused to act. Middle Eastern nations refused to act. The United Nations was incapable of acting. While leaders of nations across the free world spoke loudly but did nothing, the carnage continued unabated.

In his repeated public musings since he first said that Assad must go in 2011, and in repeated background quotes from unnamed White House sources, Obama and his White House staff offered a steady stream of incoherent opining that implied Obama did not want to escalate tensions with Russia or engage in another large-scale war in the Mideast.

They were wrong on both counts. For the record, I strongly opposed the Iraq War from the moment it was first conceived by President George W. Bush, and for the record, there were proposals that could have stemmed the killing in Syria that did not involve any large-scale war in the Middle East.

My column in The Hill last August was titled “Save the desperate Syrian children.” In that column, I repeated my support for the proposal offered by retired Gen. and former CIA Director David Petraeus to create a safe zone for Syrian refugees that would have kept them alive and provided substantial medical and humanitarian aid.

This safe zone could have been protected by creating a no-fly zone above it that could have been enforced by limited airpower involving shared contributions from the United States, Europe and Mideast nations.

Had such a safe zone been created long ago, hundreds of thousands of Syrians would still be alive today, and the flood of refugees into Europe and other nations would have been dramatically reduced.

This safe zone should be created today, after far too many of the innocent have died, to save those who remain besieged today.

Obama’s ineffective policy has been to provide deliberately inadequate aid to Syrian rebels — designed to keep them fighting but to make certain they had no chance of winning — while taking no meaningful action to effectively oppose the deliberate mass bombing of civilians by Syrian and Russian forces.

Obama never learned that refusing to effectively oppose the mass bombing of civilians by dictators such as Assad and Putin does not reduce tensions with them; it encourages them and other aggressors to escalate their aggression while the innocent continue to perish.

Appeasement, inaction and incoherence are not badges of honor for a president. They are badges of shame that good people today and historians tomorrow will condemn in horror.

Brent Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and former Chief Deputy Majority Whip Bill Alexander (D-Ark.). He holds an LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics. Contact him at brentbbi@webtv.net.

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