Obama’s remarks on Syria disingenuous: US geopolitical analyst

US President Barack Obama’s remarks that Iran, Russia, Turkey and other regional countries must be part of the solution to the Syrian crisis are disingenuous, a geopolitical analyst in New York says.

“Certainly, Iran is supposed to be part of a regional framework, regional political dialogue that could bring the Syrian war to a resolution,” said Eric Draitser, the founder of Stopimperialism.com.

“But there’s a built-in disingenuousness and dishonesty in what Obama is saying by arguing that regional powers, including Turkey, need to be involved in solving the problem, because international powers, the United States as well as its regional allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Israel and others, they are the ones who have been involved in fomenting this war from the very beginning,” he added.

Draitser made the comments in an interview with Press TV on Thursday when asked about Obama’s statement in which he said, “I do agree that we’re not going to solve the problems in Syria unless there’s buy-in from the Russians, the Iranians, the Turks, our (Persian) Gulf partners.”

Syria has been gripped by deadly unrest since March 2011. The United States and its regional allies - especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey - are supporting the militants operating inside the country.

According to the United Nations, more than 230,000 people have been killed and millions displaced due to the turmoil.

Draitser said that “this has been a very international war since 2011. A notion of some kind of uprising, indigenous uprising, and even the very notion of a civil war is quite frankly a distortion of the true nature of the conflict.”

“So for Obama to sit here in the second half of 2015 and to argue that there needs to be regional solution that would include Turkey and other powers is quite frankly disingenuous,” he stated.

“If Obama were serious, if the United States were serious in solving the problem and ending the war in Syria, they would simply force their allies in the region to cut off all support, cut off the weapons, cut off the financing, cut off the terror networks that they have been supporting, that are waging this war – pure and simple,” the analyst pointed out.

“If they were to do that, this war could end very, very quickly, because, of course, whatever terrorists would be left in Syria would be mopped off quite efficiently by the Syrian Army, by the Hezbollah forces and others,” he continued.

“And so that would be a very clear and obvious solution, but of course that’s not in the cards, because there is a geopolitical agenda at play here. And no matter what Obama might say, as he tries to cement his legacy on his way out of the White House, the reality is that the US imperial agenda has not changed for that region,” he stated. 

“There’s still a strategic calculus that the United States is working with, that is to weaken Iran, to break their alliance with Syria and Hezbollah, and to further the US and Western hegemony in the region,” Draitser emphasized.

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