Little Consensus Within Obama Administration on How to Stop Fall of Aleppo to Assad by Karen DeYoung, Washington Post
It may be no small irony that President Obama’s peripatetic secretary of state will travel next week to Rwanda, where up to a million people were killed in a three-month ethnic genocide in 1994, and has tentative plans to attend an international meeting on Syria, where civilian dead are fast approaching the halfway point of that number.
Bill Clinton, president at the time of the Rwandan massacre, has said that U.S. failure to intervene there is one of his biggest regrets. Just two years later, an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb forces in the town of Srebrenica while “the world’s great nations,” including the United States, “failed to respond adequately,” the United Nations later said.
As Obama constructs the final months of his legacy, both historical events loom large.
“Another Srebrenica, another Rwanda” are “written on that wall in front of us unless something takes place” to stop the slaughter, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy to Syria, said late last week as Russian and Syrian aircraft and artillery continued their relentless bombardment of rebel-held eastern Aleppo.
But there is no consensus within the administration about what the United States can or should do to try to bring a halt to the killing and stop what now appears to be the increasingly inevitable fall of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, to government forces…
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Syria & Russia are humiliating the West
@ColinPClarke & @courtneywmh of @RANDCorporation call for US action:
http://www.rand.org/blog/2016/10/onl...syrians.html#…
Milov explains Lavrov's sharp anti-US statement w likely intelligence about new sanctions against Russia.
https://twitter.com/v_milov/status/785089520593231872
Russia is seriously hurting from the last series of sanctions concerning Crimea and eastern Ukraine and another round would place the Russian economy into a massive tailspin....there is talks as well of disconnecting SWIFT....the nuclear economic option.....
THERE is right now far more panic among the Obama WH and DoD concerning the Russian stationing of nuclear capable tactical short range missiles into Kaliningrad....
There has been total and I mean total silence out of this Cuban Missile Crisis v3.0....
From Kaliningrad, an Iskander SSM's flight time to Warsaw is 2 minutes.
White House has said nothing about this.
A TWO minute flight time in the world of a possible nuclear attack....IS absolutely deadly....and you better be prepared to pull the overall nuclear trigger AND this WH is not prepared nor does it ever want to....THUS Article 5 of NATO is effectively dead in the water.....
This total confusion on the part of the Obama/Rhodes/Kerry WH is actually working in the favor of the US right now in Aleppo.....AS it appears even the Russians are now totally confused as to what they US is potentially up to....
WHILE they have made a number of actually very solid tactical moves against the US in the last week...strategically they are way out on a limb that they have no earthly way to figure out how to come off it.....
NOW even the Russian FM is getting nervous and he usually reflects Putin getting nervous.......
They sent in S300s/400s due to the so called US cruise missile threat against Assad AND now he is worried about "carpet bombing".....
BUT WAIT....that is what the Russians have repeatedly done in Syria...carpet bomb......
Lavrov: Russia has means to protect its Syria assets if U.S. carpet bombs
http://reut.rs/2e1hmcn
NOW we have gone from being nervous to outright PANIC........
Russia says U.S. actions threaten its national security: RIA
http://reut.rs/2dG9oGH
Russia being called out in the UNSC and now not fully understanding just what the rebels and the US are up to PLUS seeing the massive amount of new arms, munitions and weapons systems flooding into Syria along with a "rumored 121 MANPADS"...Russia is extremely nervous.....
FOR them is this is potentially the "new Afghanistan all over"......
Russian warns the US not to play 'dangerous game' in Syria
http://read.bi/2dDCuWI
BUT WAIT all the new weapons and MANPADs are coming via Qatar, Turkey and KSA AS they have seen the US incapable to defending Arab Sunni's in Syria and Aleppo.....
Better yet...how does a 500,000 original Arab Sunni district inside Aleppo now estimated at 350,000 be "reunited" with the rest of the genocidal war crimes driven Assad regime controlled non Sunni Arab Aleppo....which has been basically besieged for 48 months?
Hassan Hassan
Verified account
@hxhassan
Obama wants Mosul retaken by the time he leaves, ideally
Putin wants Aleppo to be retaken by the time Obama leaves, ideally.
"I am their leader. I must follow them." - line from 'Yes Minister' in the 1980s, a show that never loses its relevance.
Where's the boss? The leader of the free world hides his inaction behind lack of consensus in his administration.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...pm_world_pop_b
REALLY hard to be a "real leader" WHEN the "leader's" mantra is to "do nothing stupid" and "to reject the DC playbook"......
ONE would think out of over 50 options that have ben presented to the Obama/Rhodes/Kerry WH ONE could have stood out....????