Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
"He has tanks in Ukraine, jet
fighters in Syria, and Barack
Obama in the White House."
Garry Kasparov on Putin...
OUCH!
"He has tanks in Ukraine, jet
fighters in Syria, and Barack
Obama in the White House."
-Garry Kasparov
Which of the statements are not fact?
Hi, Asher,
I don't believe I said any of those "statements" (I think only one statement was quoted) were not facts.
I have to charitably take the part that Putin "has" Obama in the White house to be in the sense that Obama being in the White house is part of the actual environment in which Putin must operate.....
I would think that the situation in the middle east is a bit more complex than a game of chess. Maybe Mr. Kasparov is not the best person to comment on it.
We have Syrian opposition groups supported by Turkey, the Gulf States, the USA and there is acceptance of the practice even of financing the most extreme fanatic Islamists, as long as the one hated Assad is defeated!
Historically, there appear to be a long-standing tradition of financing religious fanatics in that part of the world.
Historically, wars have rarely been waged for no reason. Quite often these reasons are linked to geography. Let me thus try a simple exercise in geography. This is the list of countries bordering Europe, either on the other side of the mediterranean sea or directly on the eastern front:
Morocco, Algeria, Libia, Egypt, Israel, Libanon, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia.
Which ones of these countries have been in a sudden state of civil war in the past few years?
The "authorization" from the Duma was only a boisterous flourish in the face of Obama! Putin needed no such backing, his popularity is so high!The Kremlin has sold the Russian intervention in the Syrian crisis as"an inevitable step to put an end to ISIS" and a step that needed to be taken by the Russians as a result of the failure of the West (which in Russin rhetorics equals to the US) to achieve their goals. Putin asked the Duma the right to use Russian military not in Syria, not against Isis, not as a reply to Assad's plead for help, but simply "abroad". The Duma granted him this right and set no time or geography limitations for military actions. Will we be seeing attacs to Iraq soon?