Obama's 'Unfinished Business' is an American Presidential Tradition (Part 1)

© AFP 2023 / ARIS MESSINISUS President Barack Obama waves to the crowd after delivering a speech at the Niarchos foundation in Athens on November 16, 2016 at the end of his official visit in Greece
US President Barack Obama waves to the crowd after delivering a speech at the Niarchos foundation in Athens on November 16, 2016 at the end of his official visit in Greece - Sputnik International
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Every American President leaves unfinished geopolitical business behind to his successor, and Obama is no different than any of his predecessors in this regard.

The Power of the President

President Barack Obama speaks to military members and families Monday, Dec. 15, 2014, at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, in Wrightstown, N.J. - Sputnik International
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The prevailing myth is that the American President is some sort of omnipotent force capable of changing the course of global history with the stroke of a pen or the utterance of a few words.

As the chief decision maker responsible for the actions of the world’s most powerful (but not necessarily efficient) military and its most notorious intelligence agencies, the President does in fact have the final say over which operations they engage in, and this in turn gives him unparalleled power in determining which countries are victimized and which escape Washington’s wrath.

On the other hand, however, once these military and covert operations are commenced, they’re exceedingly difficult to draw down and reverse, and the outcome is always that the targets of such American activity and their immediate neighbors end up totally destabilized.

In that sense, the American President is indeed the most powerful force in the world capable of inflicting this sort of unimaginable damage on others, but he isn’t powerful enough to reverse the destruction that he or his predecessors are responsible for. Instead, other actors such as the multipolar leaders of Russia and China are the ones who are best suited to fixing the US’ messes and restoring stable order to the world.

The reason that all of this is relevant in reflecting upon is because Obama’s Presidency is finally drawing to an end, and there’s been heated speculation that he might try to wrap up the War on Syria with a ‘face saving’ exit. Whether that materializes or not is actually a moot point, since it disregards the fact that the damage is already done and that whatever the US chooses to do will simply be the beginning of a phased process, not an instantaneous snap-of-the-fingers change in policy.

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After all, while the President is the chief decision maker in the US, the vast majority of the military and covert operations that he signs off on are thought up and executed by the “deep state”, the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies that ensure policy continuity amidst presidential transitions.

The only exceptions to this are the instances when an incoming administration insists on pivoting, as Trump may be partially inclined to do, but provided that he gets “his guys” into the ‘right’ positions. No matter what the state of the War on Syria is on the day that Obama leaves office, however, the 44th President is still handing this crisis and all of its resultant consequences off to the 45th one.

This provides a worthwhile occasion for discussing some of the other unfinished geopolitical business that Obama is dumping off on Trump, as well a few high-profile and relevant examples of what their predecessors had done in charting the course for today’s hand-me-down crises in Europe and the Mideast.

Clinton

Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska is pictured on an election poster calling for votes for a referendum on their Statehood Day in Prnjavor, Bosnia and Herzegovina, September 21, 2016 - Sputnik International
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Starting off with Clinton as America’s face in the post-Cold War unipolar order, his presidency is most well-known for the Wars on Bosnia and Yugoslavia, both of which were waged in support of violent Islamic militants located in the heart of Europe.

The Mainstream Media completely buried the story behind Bosnia, but the truth is that Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic was previously imprisoned by the Yugoslav authorities in the 1980s for his active work in trying to carve out an Islamic fundamentalist state.

His infamous 1970 manifesto was titled “The Islamic Declaration” and it included such ultra-radical passages as asserting that “there's no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions” and that “the establishment of an Islamic order is thus shown as the ultimate act of democracy, because it means the implementation of the deepest desires of the Muslim nations and common man”, one which he hopes would lead to “renewal of the Islamic religious thought and creating a uniform Muslim community from Morocco to Indonesia.”

The only real difference between Izetbegovic’s mujahedeen and today’s Daesh is that the former maintained the steadily increasing and eventually direct military support of the US while the latter was ultimately abandoned by it, with geopolitical circumstances being the reason for these double standards.

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As for the Albanians, criminal and terrorist groups inhabiting the historic Serbian Province of Kosovo were inspired by the success of their counterparts in Bosnia and sought to recreate the same scenario in the southwestern corner of Yugoslavia after seeing it carried out in the northwestern one.

The so-called “Kosovo Liberation Army” was even previously labelled as a terrorist group before the US walked back on this designation and provided the “moderates” with American air support in their separatist struggle to revive the fascist-era geopolitical nightmare of “Greater Albania”.

President Clinton was thus responsible for militantly midwifing two failed ‘states’ in Europe – Bosnia and “Kosovo” – and popularizing the concept that they constitute their own separate “Bosniak” and “Kosovar” ‘ethnicities’ (as opposed to being Slavic Muslims and Yugoslav Albanians).

Moreover, as a final touch to his legacy, the first post-Cold War Color Revolution was engineered in Yugoslavia with the late-2000 “Bulldozer Revolution”, which toppled Slobodan Milosevic and in turn imparted a dangerous new weapon of destabilization to each of Clinton’s successors.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

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