Obama: Saudi Eager to Drag US into Grinding Sectarian Conflicts in ME

US president Barack Obama stated that Saudi Arabia, one of America’s most important allies in the Middle East, needs to learn how to “share” the region with Iran, adding that KSA has showed eagerness to drag the United States into grinding sectarian conflicts in the region, The New York Times wrote in an article that is based on a series of interviews with The Atlantic magazine published Thursday.

Obama lashed out at Saudi, saying a number of American allies in the Persian Gulf — as well as in Europe — were “free riders,” eager to drag the United States into grinding sectarian conflicts that sometimes had little to do with American interests. He showed little sympathy for the Saudis, who claimed that they have been threatened by the nuclear deal Obama reached with Iran.

According to NYT, the Saudis, Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s national correspondent, “need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.” The US president said, “would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle East.”

Obama placed his comments in the context of his broader struggle to extract the United States from the bloody morass of the Middle East so that the nation can focus on more promising, faster-growing parts of the world, like Asia and Latin America, NYT added.

• The US paper reported that Obama also said his support of the NATO military intervention in Libya had been a “mistake,” driven in part by his erroneous belief that Britain and France would bear more of the burden of the operation. He stoutly defended his refusal not to enforce his own red line against Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, even though Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. argued internally, the magazine reported, that “big nations don’t bluff.”

The US president disputed criticism that he should have done more to resist the aggression of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Ukraine. As a neighbor of Russia, Obama said, Ukraine was always going to matter more to Mr. Putin than to the United States. This meant that in any military confrontation between Moscow and the West, Russia was going to maintain 'escalatory dominance' over its former satellite state.

"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he said. “This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”.........http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/adetails.php?eid=259840&cid=31&fromval=1
10/3/16
--
-
Related:

• Pentagon plans heavy aerial bombardment to cripple Libyan ISIS