{"id":788,"date":"2015-07-12T10:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-07-12T10:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/?p=788"},"modified":"2015-07-12T11:07:35","modified_gmt":"2015-07-12T11:07:35","slug":"obama-loses-three-wars-and-trillions-of-dollars-by-opposing-putin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/07\/obama-loses-three-wars-and-trillions-of-dollars-by-opposing-putin.html","title":{"rendered":"Obama loses three wars and trillions of dollars by opposing Putin"},"content":{"rendered":"

L\u2019on peut me r\u00e9duire \u00e0 vivre sans bonheur,
\nMais non pas me r\u00e9soudre \u00e0 vivre sans honneur.<\/i><\/p>\n

I can be forced to live without happiness,
\nBut I will never consent to live without honor.<\/p>\n

Pierre Corneille<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

At this moment, the armed wing of the US government is on a march of hypocrisy. The Pentagon\u00a0brags about training rebel forces in Syria as if this were a great service to the world, while\u00a0describing the same behavior by the Russians in Ukraine as an unprecedented and heinous crime.<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If the rebels in Ukraine are solely the result of Russian training and arms, why are there 40,000 of them after just one year compared to\u00a0only 60 US-backed rebels after three years of \u00a0Congress-approved US training in Syria?<\/i><\/p>\n

Even more astonishing\u00a0is the fact that the Russians are obviously better at this than the Americans. The Americans have started a war with Russia on terms that will lead to American defeat. The US performance in the current proxy wars in Syria and Ukraine against Russia is pathetic, and is possibly a thousand times weaker than what the Russians are doing in turn.<\/b><\/p>\n

One need only look at the statistics. By its own admission, during the course of three years of constant warfare in Syria, the United States has managed to train only sixty men. America’s plan for victory over the Russian-Iranian-blessed\u00a0Assad government consists of sending thirty men to remove him from power, while the other thirty are pinned down in fighting with the Islamic State – a group that appears to have gained 100,000 elite troops\u00a0without the Americans training a single one of them.<\/p>\n

The United States clings to feeble and ousted groups like the “Free Syrian Army” in Syria while claiming that the far larger and more legitimate Russian-backed rebellion taking place in Ukraine is only surviving through Russian support. It can mean two possible things. Either the Pentagon\u00a0is simply one thousand times inferior to the Russians when it comes to training insurgents around the world, or the Pentagon is supporting feeble and ousted groups and causes throughout the world while Russia is firmly on the side of stronger factions that have a more legitimate grasp on power.<\/p>\n

Either answer leads one to the conclusion that the US cannot win in either of these protracted conflicts, and the reason is either\u00a0inept US training or inept\u00a0US\u00a0planning in the face of a superior and determined adversary. Having only faced the most flimsy of opponents for the last twenty-five years, the return to a Cold War-like confrontation with Russia may have caught the United States by surprise. Suddenly, the so-called superpower is no longer able to channel all its resources into defeating a small Third World country but must instead fight against a comparable power with possibly more resources and even greater competence. All the tools that had made the US able to finger-wag against other countries, as the “only\u00a0superpower”, have become worthless overnight because of the US’s\u00a0idiotic plan to confront Russia.<\/p>\n

As in the Cold War, strategic\u00a0bombers and nuclear weapons provide no military edge to the US\u00a0anymore because the Russians have the same capability. Cruise missiles can no longer be used to threaten Bashar al-Assad because Putin has long since given Assad the very same weapons. Overwhelming air power can no longer be used to threaten to decimate Third World armies because Putin can simply give these crude armies access to his latest air defenses, potentially forcing\u00a0the United States to rely\u00a0on ground warfare in future conflicts and sustaining mass casualties again as it did in the first Cold War.<\/p>\n

The US is losing in Syria, Ukraine and in other conflict zones now because it is still arrogantly applying the paradigm of fighting an inferior enemy in a fight against a superior enemy rather than reverting to its old Cold War military doctrines. The result is that US planners and trainers will find themselves immediately outnumbered, outgunned, and outclassed in every conflict zone\u00a0now by Russian planners and trainers because the Americans\u00a0picked the worst possible moment to make an enemy out of Russia.<\/p>\n

Obama’s reckless decision to confront Putin when the US military is so overstretched and exposed\u00a0around the world and applying the wrong military doctrine will be extremely costly. This is assuming\u00a0that the Russians can be expected to be sabotaging every American effort in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and possibly even Yemen and redeploying their own trainers and planners around the world to counter the Americans. Unlike the Americans, Russian doctrine has not changed since the Cold War and Russia can be expected\u00a0hit American interests as hard now as it did in the Cold War.<\/p>\n

Sadly for the American people, this is no exaggeration. The desire to oppose Putin today has rendered valueless\u00a0almost all American strategic actions achieved in cooperation with Russia since the 9\/11 attacks. It means\u00a0all the thousands of lives lost by the United States Army in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last fifteen years were for utterly nothing and everything they won has been undone, gallons of American blood\u00a0splashed across the sand\u00a0for nothing but several political outcomes now rendered void in this\u00a0“new Cold War”.<\/p>\n

To clarify on this point, it\u00a0is clear that US grand plans in Iraq and Afghanistan – which it spent trillions of taxpayer dollars upon – have been wrecked by Russia and Iran\u00a0as the Iraqi and Afghan governments ultimately plan\u00a0to be aligned with Russia and Iran and distance themselves from the murderous American occupiers who invaded\u00a0their homelands, following the final US exit from the region. For the US leadership, there is no consolation. The conflict with Putin\u00a0guarantees\u00a0three or four wars lost, thousands of soldiers’ deaths rendered meaningless, and trillions of dollars wasted, even assuming\u00a0the US manages to force a satisfactory partition of Ukraine that gives it the opportunity to install its new missile bases close to Moscow.<\/p>\n

The US knows its Syrian rebel training program is a failure and has been pushed into supporting the anti-NATO Kurdish PYD and PKK militias – and even the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps\u00a0(in Iraq at least) as the only viable non-Assad forces against ISIS. The problem with this foolish\u00a0strategy to save face is that the PYD, PKK and Iran don’t actually share US goals anymore than ISIS does, so the move serves little purpose other than propaganda to hide the expensive\u00a0failure\u00a0of the US leadership to topple Assad after\u00a0three years of continuing violence and failed predictions coming from Washington.<\/p>\n

By supporting his\u00a0own enemies, the Kurds and the Iranians, as he searches for an exit strategy from his disasters in Iraq and Syria, Obama hopes to dupe the American\u00a0public into believing that three years of American defeat, dishonor, failure, lies, squander\u00a0and humiliation in Syria were\u00a0actually some kind of costly successes. New Cold War or not, Russia has the advantage and a whole host of\u00a0US-led wars\u00a0have been thrown into jeopardy by the decision to oppose Putin in Ukraine. Whether or not harming Russian interests in Ukraine was worth the US losing three or more other wars and undermining its security all over the world will be left to historians to decide.<\/p>\n

\n

By\u00a0Harry J. Bentham<\/a><\/p>\n

\"HJB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

L\u2019on peut me r\u00e9duire \u00e0 vivre sans bonheur, Mais non pas me r\u00e9soudre \u00e0 vivre sans honneur. I can be forced to live without happiness, But I will never consent to live without honor. Pierre Corneille At this moment, the armed wing of the US government is on a march of hypocrisy. The Pentagon\u00a0brags about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":577,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,68,71,63,37,72,153,67,66,15,69],"tags":[794,923,30,29,509,927,926,922,83,31,928,925,655,152,921,929,73,919,924,84,918,239,917,916,920],"class_list":["post-788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alter-globalization","category-conflict-2","category-conflict-resolution","category-futurism-2","category-history","category-international-relations","category-lordre-2","category-middle-east","category-politics-2","category-us","category-violence","tag-afghanistan","tag-assad","tag-cold-war","tag-conflict","tag-iran","tag-irgc","tag-kurds","tag-military-doctrine","tag-nato","tag-new-cold-war","tag-only-superpower","tag-pkk","tag-putin","tag-pyd","tag-russia-enemy","tag-russians","tag-syria","tag-syrian-civil-war","tag-three-wars-lost","tag-ukraine","tag-ukraine-war","tag-united-states","tag-us-defeats","tag-us-failure-in-syria","tag-war-on-syria"],"yoast_head":"\nObama loses three wars and trillions of dollars by opposing Putin - L'Ordre<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/07\/obama-loses-three-wars-and-trillions-of-dollars-by-opposing-putin.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Obama loses three wars and trillions of dollars by opposing Putin - L'Ordre\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"L\u2019on peut me r\u00e9duire \u00e0 vivre sans bonheur, Mais non pas me r\u00e9soudre \u00e0 vivre sans honneur. 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Bentham","description":"Harry J. Bentham is a British futurist blogger who has been a contributor at a number of think tanks including the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies since 2013. His work at Press TV and the L'Ordre blog featured at the multi-faith Beliefnet website has gained increasing attention and praise, including in the international media. Commentaries on political and ethical controversies by Bentham have been published at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, H+ Magazine, Dissident Voice and numerous other publications. 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