Time to think of legacy? The Obama Doctrine

RT – By Cynthia McKinney – Given what has happened to the Arab World with US attention, the rest of Asia must shudder at the prospect of what could happen to it with President Obama’s new doctrine: “Pivot to Asia.”

A recent Obama interview, conducted by noted American-Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg entitled, “The Obama Doctrine: The US President Talks Through His Hardest Decisions About America’s Role in the World,” caused me to think about the president’s legacy, something I’m sure he is now also contemplating.  

With the campaign to succeed him in full swing, President Obama sat down with Goldberg to discuss US foreign policy during the Obama years. The word “legacy” appears only once in the article in a Goldberg reference to the president’s deal with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weapons. However, in all honesty, the article is extremely difficult to read due to its bombastic editorializing on events that did not happen and willful blindness to events that did.

For example, the article, seemingly with Obama in agreement, intones that Syria’s government used sarin gas against civilians. Apparently contradicting this, United Nations investigator Carla del Ponte said in an interview that the UN has no indication at all that the Syrian government used chemical weapons; she went on to say witness testimony seemed to indicate it was the opponents of the government who used chemical weapons. 

It is this kind of dissembling that characterizes the Obama Administration. Giving good speeches is not the same as making good public policy. Making a good speech and then doing the opposite, or using the speech to lead people to believe one thing that is in actuality quite another has been honed to a science in the current Administration. It leads one to ask whether Obama and the journalists that report on speeches are referring to the real world or the virtual world that exists only in the Washington, D.C. “bubble.”

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