Angelina Jolie on violence in Syria

Angelina Jolie on violence in Syria | MSNBC.

Angelina Jolie shows that she understands that the crisis in Syria was mishandled from the beginning, and complains against the continued lack of political will to do anything about it, noting that the situation there and throughout the region has now grown too complex. And she said all this without antagonizing the Obama Administration. Very smart on her part. I, on the other hand, cannot afford to be that smart. Somebody should call an ass an ass, otherwise not enough people might see it. To me, Obama has no clothes, and it’s not a pretty sight.

Of course it’s Obama’s mess!

Will the U.S. intervene on Maliki’s side in Iraq? If Obama is honest about not determining outcomes of “somebody else’s civil war,” as he said in reference to Syria, then, he’s unlikely to do anything serious in terms of providing support to embattled Maliki.

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Ford: I couldn’t defend U.S. Syria policy

Ford: I couldn’t defend U.S. Syria policy.

Finally, Ambassador Ford can say what he has probably been itching to say for many long months. The Obama Administration’s Syria policy is indefensible. It has served to empower Assad, Al-Qaeda, Iran and Russia, and, in the process, it rolled the clock back to Cold War times. Who gives a damn about killing Bin Ladin long after he had become an irrelevant figure, and at a time when the Administration’s foreign policies, and non-policies, and its reliance on drone attacks as its sole instrument for fighting terrorism, have served to give Al-Qaeda new havens in Syria and Yemen, among other places, as well as a new set of leaders, and has actually managed, despite the ideological divide between them, to foster an emerging and strong cooperation between Al-Qaeda affiliated groups and the regimes in Iran and Syria. Yet, according to President Barack Obama, we should somehow see wisdom, and even victory, in all these developments. Meanwhile, human rights activists like me are now castigated as warmongers because we demand that genocidal maniacs be stopped, and for Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and other terrorist entities and groups be seriously fought, not just pricked.

The speech I would have given

… had I been invited to speak at the White House Correspondents Dinner

What can I say about President Barack Obama that hasn’t been said before? Oh yes, that he’s a man of action, – though mostly so unobtrusive that it is often confused with inaction, – a man who puts the fear of God in his enemies, – well, at least those of them who are not Russian, Chinese, North Korean, Iranian, Syrian or Republican, – and is known to his friends all over the world, yes all none of them, as Mr. Reliable and Trustworthy. “That Barack Hussein Obama,” the Saudi monarch recently told me, “he is as reliable as a doorknob, on the wrong side of the door.” What a wonderful testament.

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