An honest person would have described all these events very differently, including what "America stands for." There could have been at least some acknowledgement of how the United States in the post-World War II era has often relied on "the barrel of a gun" -- or cruise missiles and smart bombs -- to impose its will on other countries, including "regime change" in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011.
Obama could have acknowledged, too, that the United States has often used coups d'etat to unseat governments not to its liking, even when the leaders have been popularly elected. A partial list would include Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile in 1973, Aristide in Haiti twice, Chavez in Venezuela briefly in 2002, Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Morsi in Egypt in 2013, and now Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014.
But instead Obama chose to present a simplistic, propagandistic version of what has transpired in Ukraine. Essentially he's saying: It's all Russia's fault and everyone on the U.S. side is a good guy, on "the right side of history."
It is interesting, however, that Obama did not come out directly and implicate Russia and the eastern Ukrainian rebels in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Given his access to detailed U.S. intelligence on the topic, he should have been able to point the finger directly, if indeed that's what the facts showed. Instead, he played word games to create the impression that the rebels and Russia were to blame without actually spelling out any evidence against them.
This was similar to how President George W. Bush gave speeches in 2002 and 2003 juxtaposing the names Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to create the perception among Americans that the two were joined at the hip when they were, in fact, bitter enemies. Now, President Obama has come to replicate these Bush-like deceptions.
There is also new evidence of how the supposedly "popular" government in Kiev has been developing its democracy -- by incarcerating people who dare to protest against its policies. As the New York Times' Andrew E. Kramer reported on Thursday, the Kiev regime has been padding its prisoner exchanges by throwing in political dissidents arrested far from any battlefield.
Kramer wrote:
"The Ukrainians ... widely understood to be lacking enough prisoners of their own to effect a one-for-one exchange, set free a motley group of men, women and teenagers wearing tracksuits or dirty jeans, and taken, they said, from jails as far away as Kiev."Soon enough, many of them were objecting to anybody who would listen there on the highway that they had never fought for pro-Russian separatists, and in fact had no idea how they ended up in a prisoner exchange in eastern Ukraine. ...In interviews at their point of release and in a dormitory where former detainees are housed in Donetsk, a dozen men freed in exchanges over the weekend by the Ukrainian Army gave similar accounts. Some said they were arrested months ago in other parts of Ukraine for pro-Russian political actions, such as joining protests calling for autonomy in eastern Ukraine or for distributing leaflets."
In other words, the Kiev regime does not only send Nazi storm troopers to attack people in eastern Ukraine but it jails citizens elsewhere who pass out leaflets. Recognizing some of these darker truths -- rather than simply reciting a litany of shiny propaganda -- could have given President Obama's UN address more credibility.
Perhaps the old Obama would have made a stab at greater intellectual honesty but the new one has taken on the personality of his predecessor, who famously didn't do nuance.
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