Obama and Putin spar over Syria at the U.N.
(Worthy News) – President Obama and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin tried to downplay personal and policy tensions during a rare face-to-face meeting Monday in New York, but fierce disagreements bubbled to the surface in competing speeches to an audience of other world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin differed most strongly on Syria’s bloody civil war, the best way to take on the jihadi Islamic State movement, and whether Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, should remain in power in any final political settlement. They also presented very different, perhaps incompatible, worldviews, with Mr. Obama painting the U.S. as the keeper of global order and Mr. Putin blasting America as a “single force of domination” that believes it can do as it pleases with no accountability.
The two leaders, who have not held substantive talks in more than two years, shared a chilly handshake for the cameras and dispensed with pleasantries before disappearing behind closed doors for their meeting, with a number of bodyguards on each side. [ Source ]
King’s pawn to UN: Putin checkmates Obama on Syria, Ukraine
President Obama’s harsh criticism of Vladimir Putin’s policies on Monday at the U.N. General Assembly didn’t erase the fact that the Russian president has checkmated him in Ukraine and Syria.
A senior administration official told reporters after the two leaders met privately for the first time in two years that the two sides “fundamentally disagreed” on the role Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would play in that country’s future.
“I think the Russians certainly understood the importance of there being a political resolution in Syria and there being a process that pursues a political resolution,” the official said of the 90-minute meeting. “We have a difference about what the outcome of that process would be.” [ Source ]
After Four Years of Failure in Syria, Obama Looks to Russia and Iran for Help
When President Barack Obama spoke at the United Nations today, he opened the door wide to cooperation with Iran and Russia in an effort to end the Syrian civil war that has shattered the Middle East, spawned ferocious new terrorist forces, and driven millions toward the frontiers of Europe to seek safety.
In what was generally a boilerplate paean to democracy, the rule of law, and the virtues of diplomacy, Obama conceded “nowhere is our commitment to international order more tested than in Syria,” where “realism dictates that compromise will be required.”
Reality also demonstrates that Obama’s efforts to shape a policy over the last four years of violence have been utter failures, with the latest humiliations including the defection of U.S.-trained Syrian rebel forces to the ranks of al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.
Given the difficult business of choosing between evils, Obama’s sticking to his commitment to fight the so-called Islamic State: “We will not be outlasted by extremists,” he said. [ Source ]