William Blum’s Awkward Questions for Obama on Foreign Policy

William Blum is a writer and campaigner against America’s barbarous and brutal foreign policy. As well as writing a series of books, he also produces the Anti-Empire Report on the web. In the latest issue, 141, he puts a series of awkward questions that should be asked of Obama regarding his foreign policy in the Middle East, but which won’t. Several of these are about the way America is determined to punish Syria, but does nothing about Saudi Arabia, which has done far more to support Islamist terrorism. He also points out just how much aid Turkey gives to the Islamists.

Which is most important to you – destroying ISIS, overthrowing Syrian president Assad, or scoring points against Russia?

Do you think that if you pointed out to the American people that Assad has done much more to aid and rescue Christians in the Middle East conflicts than any other area leader that this would lessen the hostility the United States public and media feel toward him? Or do you share the view of the State Department spokesperson who declared in September that “The Assad regime frankly is the root of all evil”?

Why does the United States maintain crippling financial sanctions and a ban on military aid to Syria, Cuba, Iran and other countries but not to Saudi Arabia?

What does Saudi Arabia have to do to lose its strong American support? Increase its torture, beheadings, amputations, whippings, stonings, punishment for blasphemy and apostasy, or forced marriages and other oppression of women and girls? Increase its financial support for ISIS and other jihadist groups? Confess to its role in 9-11? Attack Israel?

What bothers you more: The Saudi bombing of the people of Yemen or the Syrian bombing of the people of Syria?

Does the fact that ISIS never attacks Israel raise any question in your mind?

Does it concern you that Turkey appears to be more intent upon attacking the Kurds and the Russians than attacking ISIS? And provides medical care to wounded ISIS soldiers? Or that ISIS deals its oil on Turkish territory? Or that NATO-member Turkey has been a safe haven for terrorists from Libya, Chechnya, Qatar, and elsewhere? Or that last year Vice President Biden stated that Turkish president Erdogan’s regime was backing ISIS with “hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons”?

In the previous issue, 140, Blum points out how much aid the Western nations, as well as the Gulf states, have given ISIS, al-Qaeda and the other Islamist terrorists, and how they have used them against secular regimes. Like Gaddafi’s in Libya. He also suggests that the real reason for the attack on Syria is partly over control of another strategic oil pipeline.

The mainstream media almost never mentions the proposed Qatar natural-gas pipelines – whose path to Europe Syria has stood in the way of for years – as a reason for much of the hostility toward Syria. The pipelines could dethrone Russia as Europe’s dominant source of energy.

He also states that the real reason for the US’ hostility to Assad isn’t because he’s a vicious dictator, but because he’s independent and does not do what Washington tells him.

The United States, I suggest, is hostile to the Syrian government for the same reason it has been hostile to Cuba for more than half a century; and hostile to Venezuela for the past 15 years; and earlier to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; and to Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Chile; and so on continuing through the world atlas and history books.

What these governments have had in common can be summarized in a single word – independence … independence from American foreign policy; the refusal to be a client state of Washington; the refusal to be continuously hostile to Washington’s Officially Designated Enemies; insufficient respect and zeal for the capitalist way of life.

They’re at http://williamblum.org/aer/read/140

Go and read what’s really behind America’s and the Tories’ Middle Eastern policy; and http://williamblum.org/aer/read/141

Tags: al-Qaeda, Anti-Empire Report, Assad, Cambodia, Chechnya, Christians, Colonel Gaddafy, Dominican Republic, Erdogan, ISIS, Islamism, Jo Biden, Kurds, Laos, Middle East, NATO, Obama, Qatar, Qatar Natural Gas Pipeline, Sanctions, Uruguay, William Blum