Syria is to Russia what Israel is to the U.S.. As is Iran. The fact that Obama ever thought Russia would agree to Assad being toppled is a stunning indictment of his rank stupidity and incompetence.
Excerpted From The Hill: Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday harshly condemned Russian activity in Syria that he blamed for the dissolution of one-on-one talks, but insisted that the U.S. was not abandoning hopes for peace in the five-year civil war.
“We have to persist in our effort to end the conflict in Syria,” a beleaguered Kerry said during a speech in Brussels.
“I want to be very, very clear to everybody: We are not giving up on the Syrian people, we are not abandoning the pursuit of peace, we are not going to leave the multilateral field,” he said. “We are going to continue to try to find a way forward in order to try to end this war.”
On Monday, the Obama administration claimed that Russia was refusing to rein in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, leading to escalated bloodshed and a humanitarian catastrophe in the city of Aleppo.
The Kremlin has made an “irresponsible and profoundly ill-advised decision” to stick by Assad’s side, Kerry said Tuesday.
“Together, the Syrian regime and Russia seem to have rejected diplomacy in furtherance of trying to pursue a military victory, over the broken bodies, the bombed out hospitals, the traumatized children of a long-suffering land,” Kerry said. “People who are serious about making peace behave differently than the way Russia has chosen to behave.”
Russia, for its part, has blamed the U.S. for the breakdown of a tentative ceasefire over the last few weeks, claiming that Washington continues to support Islamic extremists among the anti-Assad rebels.
The Obama administration’s decision to pull the plug on talks with Russia was seen as an especially dispiriting low in its efforts to stem the chaos in Syria, which have so far been ineffective. The ongoing violence has left an estimated 400,000 people dead and created a political vacuum that allowed for the growth of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and other extremist organizations. Read the whole thing
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