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This does not make any sense. When is Mr. Obama sincere? When he says that his NATO “coalition” attacks in Syria are aimed at eradicating ISIS, or when he says that he has no legal authority for provoking a neocon-inspired regime change in Syria?

If President Obama does not want to fight al-Qaeda”€”the group behind the 9/11 attacks”€”and its close ally the Islamic State (ISIS), he should at the very least let those who want to fight them do it. Nowadays he seems much more anxious to train and arm small groups of so-called “€œmoderate”€ Islamist Syrian rebels (who have not a chance in hell to take control of the Syrian government) than to really fight the terrorists of al-Qaeda and of the Islamist State (ISIS), who are the ones who would take over Syria if the Assad government were to fall. On the contrary, for months now Mr. Obama has done his best to prevent the Kurds, the Iranians, and the Russians, along with the al-Assad government, from fighting the Islamist terrorists. Why? Could somebody ask him why? And for what purpose?

US-led air strikes in Iraq and in Syria against the Islamist terrorists have been judged ineffective from the start, and ISIS has demonstrated it by pursuing its expansion, presumably because such very selective bombings were never a priority and were rather a covert and dishonest show to fool people about the real objective of the US-NATO bombings.

That objective appears not as a priority to destroy ISIS or push it back, but rather to illegally provoke a regime change in Syria. This is done by backing different sets of Islamist rebels over time. This is a dangerous game. And all this is for mainly crass economic motives, i.e., to facilitate the construction of pipelines from the Middle East toward Europe, Turkey, and Israel.

This Machiavellian policy is not only destabilizing and destroying the entire Middle East, it is now about to destabilize and destroy Europe itself with millions of migrants and refugees fleeing the mess that has resulted ever since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the US and its allies”€™ support for the Syrian insurrection since 2011. European countries have already suspended the Schengen Agreement regarding freedom of movement within the European Union (EU), and other similar policy decisions of European disintegration by member states are to be expected in the coming months if the avalanche of migrants and refugees continues unabated from the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Ever since the neocons have dominated US foreign policy, American-led interventions in the world have been a source of great instability and of devastating destruction. They have resulted in creating disaster upon disaster, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and many millions displaced and impoverished, and forced into exile.

So far, at least three countries have been completely destroyed, i.e., Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and the carnage goes on in Afghanistan and in Yemen, with the US supporting Saudi Arabia’s bombing of the latter country. American politicians and the US government cannot close their eyes and wash their hands of this chaotic mess because they started it, and because of that, they have a special responsibility to correct it and contribute to bringing back peace and order in that part of the world.

If the secular al-Assad government is ever toppled and is replaced by one led by fanatical Islamists, and if revenge killings and massacres of the Syrian Christians, Alawites, and Druze ensue”€”a possible result of the confused imperialistic US-NATO foreign policy”€”Barack H. Obama and other American and European politicians will have to place a large part of the blame on themselves. This is not a trivial matter.