The brinkmanship in which President's Obama and Putin are now engaged over Syria was entirely avoidable.  It is the result of supremely misguided and – in many cases – entirely illegal policies implemented by our president and members of his administration, including his old secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Think back to the "Arab Spring."  The purpose of that movement was never to usher in democratic rule in formerly secular Arab dictatorships, despite the gushing of the major media over the "birth of freedom." The Arab Spring was the outward expression of an operation to replace secular dictatorships in the Middle East (primarily the Levant) with Islamic dictatorships. All this was prelude to the creation of a new Islamic "caliphate," which the progressives in the West mistakenly viewed as a means to bring the Middle East into parity, economically, with the rest of the world. They envisioned a sort of Islamic...(Read Full Article)