From cartoonist Clay Jones about ‘Getting Serious With Putin,’ Bashar Assad, and American foreign policy
Golly, did Vladimir Putin dis Obama at Monday’s meeting at the United Nations? You can bet your rubles on it.
Putin has a history of throwing his weight around world leaders. Knowing German leader Angela Merkel has a fear of dogs, Putin brought his huge Labrador into their meetings. So yesterday, he chose to make Obama wait 20 minutes for their lunch date. What a nice guy. I’m sure there’s something more important than meeting with the leader of the free world.
The United States wants Bashar Assad out of Syria. Russia thinks we have to work with him. Francois Hollande, president of France, put it best saying, “You can’t put together victims and the people who are killing them. Assad is the origin of this problem and cannot be part of the solution.”
Hard truth time. Putin makes good points regarding fighting ISIS, but they’re wrong about Assad. When Russia helps Assad fight ISIS, Assad will most likely be targeting rebels in his civil war. And civilians.
Other hard truth: Obama has no strategy for Syria. It will be his only failure in the eyes of historians. But beyond Obama, the United States does not have credibility in establishing leaders in the Middle East. It doesn’t matter if the president is a Democrat or a Republican. American foreign policy usually sucks. Despite the right-wing love affair, it sucked under Reagan. Yes. It sucked under Reagan.
We have destabilized the Middle East. We did that long before Iraq. We did that in the 1950s. We spent decades supporting Israel without question. We supported coups in Iran. We bombed Iraq for oil prices. A decade later, we invaded Iraq because someone attacked us from Afghanistan. We invaded Afghanistan. We supported the Arab Spring in Libya and Egypt. Which of these has worked out? For that matter, it doesn’t work out for Russia either.
We created an atmosphere for ISIS. Russia created an atmosphere for the Taliban. It seems the only solution is to mess up a country together. That’ll be new.
Yeah, this is gonna work out.
I love the movie “Airplane.” Yeah, you kinda see the punchline coming. I wonder if younger people won’t understand the reference.
http://claytoonz.com/2015/09/29/getting-serious-with-putin/
