Swipes...

Obama swipes at Putin, Cheney and Trump in U.N. address

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

President Barack Obama took repeated swipes at Vladimir Putin, Dick Cheney and even Donald Trump, without mentioning them by name, in an address to the United Nations on Monday, holding them up as examples of forces playing off fears and attempting to pull the country and world backward.

Putin was a particular focus for Obama, as he railed against regimes that repress information and jail dissidents, lighting into the people who prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad “because the alternative is surely worse” — a central Russian proposition — and then spending several minutes digging into a new condemnation of Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Obama mocked Putin’s state-run media for portraying the Ukraine move as proof of a resurgent Russia, noting that it only drove Ukraine closer to Europe and led to sanctions that had crippled the economy in Moscow. Obama is set to meet with Putin later in the day, ending a year of estrangement over Ukraine.

Obama invoked the invasion of Iraq as an example of how the United States itself stumbled by going against international law, saying that American leadership had failed then with consequences that continue to ripple. A key figure pushing for the invasion was then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who showed little concern for international law.

“Unless we work with other nations under the mantle of international principles … we will not succeed,” Obama said. “Any order that our militaries will impose will be temporary.”

That dangerous thread continues to run through American politics, Obama said, among people who believe that “the only strength that matters for the United States is bellicose words and shows of force.”

They’re wrong, and so are the people “calling for the building of walls to keep out immigrants,” Obama said, landing on probably the best-known plank of Trump’s presidential campaign.

The president's speech centered on a call to action in Syria, calling Assad a “tyrant” who must be removed, with the entire international community coming together to help make that happen.

“When a dictator slaughters tens of thousands of his own people, that is not just a matter of one nation’s internal affairs,” Obama said.

Obama brushed back those like Putin who say that the only realistic approach is to keep Assad in power.

“Realism requires a transition away from Assad and towards a new leader,” he said, though he didn’t specify how he intended to achieve an end that he’s called for since the conflict began, but been unable to make happen.

Obama held himself up as an example of how to make international diplomacy work. The U.N. is a body famous for spending a lot of time and money sitting around in rooms like this one, he said, bemoaning what’s gone wrong in the world and urging international action, but rarely delivering much more than resolutions.

That’s a huge contrast to the Iran agreement he spearheaded, Obama said. If the deal is “fully implemented," he said, "the prohibition on nuclear weapons is strengthened, a potential war is averted, our world is safer. That is the strength of the international system when it works the way it should.”

Obama is set to meet with Putin later Monday afternoon for a bilateral summit that representatives of both presidents have insisted was at the request of the other, and which the Russians have already tried to undercut by saying they’ve worked out an agreement on Syria with Iran and Turkey. They also deny that Ukraine will be discussed at the meeting, as American officials insist it will be.

But Obama in his speech put out a warning to Putin and other repressive leaders.

“The strong men of today become the spark of revolution tomorrow. You can jail your opponents, but you can’t imprison ideas,” Obama said. “You cannot turn a lie into truth.”

Obama drew the biggest applause lines in his speech when he spoke about normalizing relations with Cuba and calling for the U.S. Congress to lift the embargo. Turning back to his 2008 slogan, Obama said people around the world “can be made to fear, they can be taught to hate, but they can also respond to hope.”

“History is littered with the failure of false prophets and fallen empires,” Obama said. “We are called upon to offer a different type of leadership.”

Taking the podium at the General Assembly about an hour after Obama, Putin fired back. He didn’t name Obama either, but said that people who complain about Russia’s approach by saying he’s driven only by bigger global ambitions is an argument made “as if those who say it have no ambitions at all.”

Obama’s wrong, he said. There is no path forward in Syria, or against terrorism more widely, without Assad, who like his father has long been Moscow’s closest ally in the region.

“We think it’s an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces,” Putin said, according to the simultaneous U.N. translation provided for Putin’s speech. “We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad’s forces are truly fighting ISIS.”

The chaos in the Middle East, Putin said, is not because Russia is propping up dictators, but because the United States created power vacuums by violating international law and invading Iraq, as well as by not doing enough to stabilize countries like Libya after the removal of dictators.

“Instead of the trail of democracy, we got violence and poverty,” Putin said, adding that the problem can be sourced back to the end of the Cold War, when “those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think that they were so strong and exceptional that they did not have to deal with the U.N.''