Eric Zuesse

On more than one occasion, U.S. President Barack Obama overrode agreements that his Secretary of State John Kerry had reached with Russia. Unlike Obama’s consistent support of his prior Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s, initiatives (such as her backing of the coup that on 28 June 2009 had overthrown the progressive democratically elected President of Honduras and replaced him with a fascist regime), Secretary of State Kerry has repeatedly suffered humiliations from his boss’s (Obama’s) reversals of agreements that Kerry had reached with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The latest such incident was headlined at the “Moon of Alabama” blog on December 21st, "How The Military Excluded The White House From International Syria Negotiations”, where the anonymous blogger arbitrarily blamed “the military” (instead of Kerry’s boss, Obama) for having sabotaged “the White House” (instead of sabotaged the Kerry-Lavrov agreement) — the agreement that Secretary of State Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had reached on 17 May 2016 for a “comprehensive ceasefire” between the U.S. and Russia regarding Syria (and which the White House then sabotaged).

Obama never condemned nor fired any general, nor anyone else, for having perpetrated the U.S. bombing of Syrian government forces at Deir Zor, on 17 September 2016 — the sabotaging-event, which naturally caused Putin to instruct Lavrov to terminate all discussions with Kerry, because it displayed Obama’s unwavering determination to defeat Russia. (That sabotaging-event then motivated the meeting, on December 20th, when Russia, Turkey, and Iran, met together and agreed in their joint “Moscow Declaration”, to complete, on their own, their war against the West’s jihadists who were trying to overthrow Assad; and so, the jihadists in Aleppo simply surrendered to Assad’s government — and the U.S. government and its propaganda ‘press’ howled that this was a victory for the ‘brutal’ Assad against ‘the civilians’, and against ‘the rebels’ — the latter being actually the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-backed jihadists.)

Kerry had failed because Obama wanted a military settlement of the U.S.-backed jihadist invasion of Syria; he didn’t want a diplomatic end to it — at least not a diplomatic end that wasn’t a surrender by the Syrian government forces: the replacement of Assad by the jihadists (who were backed not only by Obama, but by King Saud who owns Saudi Arabia, and by Emir Thani who owns Qatar).

And this sabotage, by Obama, actually repeated Obama’s earlier refusal to accept the deal that Kerry had negotiated with Lavrov to settle the conflict in Ukraine. As I had headlined on 7 June 2015, “Obama Sidelines Kerry on Ukraine Policy”. Kerry had told the U.S.-installed regime in Ukraine to cease promising to conquer the two breakaway regions that had refused to accept rule by America’s puppets after Obama’s coup overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian President, for whom both of those regions, Crimea and Donbass, had overwhelmingly voted. Crimea rejoined Russia, of which it had been a part for hundreds of years before the Soviet dictator had transferred it to Ukraine in 1954, but on 17 September 2014 Putin declined the urgings of Donbass to become a part of Russia, and so Donbass became instead an independent country, for the time being. Though Kerry told Obama’s puppet-President of Ukraine to adhere to the Minsk agreements, Kerry’s nominal subordinate, Hillary Clinton’s friend Victoria Nuland, told this puppet to ignore Kerry’s statement, and Obama backed Nuland against her nominal superior, Kerry. If Kerry had been working under a decent President, he would have been a great Secretary of State, and Kerry cannot reasonably be blamed for his misfortune — and the world’s — that his ‘superior’ (the U.S. President under whom he served) was Obama.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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