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International News Title: The Obama Doctrine and how globalists on the left and right tricked him into war At the outset of the Syrian uprising, in early 2011, Power argued that the rebels, drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens, deserved Americas enthusiastic support. Others noted that the rebels were farmers and doctors and carpenters, comparing these revolutionaries to the men who won Americas war for independence. Obama flipped this plea on its head. When you have a professional army, he once told me, that is well armed and sponsored by two large statesIran and Russiawho have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict
He paused. The notion that we could havein a clean way that didnt commit U.S. military forceschanged the equation on the ground there was never true. The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President Busha president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was Dont do stupid shit. Obamas reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obamas secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assads violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad
left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled. When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clintons assessment that great nations need organizing principles, and Dont do stupid stuff is not an organizing principle, Obama became rip-shit angry, according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how Dont do stupid shit could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that the questions we were asking in the White House were Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is prostupid shit? The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would hug it out on Marthas Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.) I was told that Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly warned Obama against drawing a red line on chemical weapons, fearing that it would one day have to be enforced. Kerry, in his remarks on August 30, 2013, suggested that Assad should be punished in part because the credibility and the future interests of the United States of America and our allies were at stake. It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk. Ninety minutes later, at the White House, Obama reinforced Kerrys message in a public statement: Its important for us to recognize that when over 1,000 people are killed, including hundreds of innocent children, through the use of a weapon that 98 or 99 percent of humanity says should not be used even in war, and there is no action, then were sending a signal that that international norm doesnt mean much. And that is a danger to our national security. It appeared as though Obama had drawn the conclusion that damage to American credibility in one region of the world would bleed into others, and that U.S. deterrent credibility was indeed at stake in Syria. Assad, it seemed, had succeeded in pushing the president to a place he never thought he would have to go. Obama generally believes that the Washington foreign-policy establishment, which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of credibility particularly the sort of credibility purchased with force. The preservation of credibility, he says, led to Vietnam. Within the White House, Obama would argue that dropping bombs on someone to prove that youre willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force. But the president had grown queasy. In the days after the gassing of Ghouta, Obama would later tell me, he found himself recoiling from the idea of an attack unsanctioned by international law or by Congress. The American people seemed unenthusiastic about a Syria intervention; so too did one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She told him that her country would not participate in a Syria campaign. And in a stunning development, on Thursday, August 29, the British Parliament denied David Cameron its blessing for an attack. John Kerry later told me that when he heard that, internally, I went, Oops. Obama was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who interrupted the Presidents Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each morning from Clappers analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syrias use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a slam dunk. He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a slam dunk in Iraq. The unraveling of the Arab Spring darkened the presidents view of what the U.S. could achieve in the Middle East, and made him realize how much the chaos there was distracting from other priorities. The president recognized during the course of the Arab Spring that the Middle East was consuming us, John Brennan, who served in Obamas first term as his chief counterterrorism adviser, told me recently. But what sealed Obamas fatalistic view was the failure of his administrations intervention in Libya, in 2011. That intervention was meant to prevent the countrys then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a strong faction within the national-security teamSecretary of State Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken, who was then Bidens national-security adviserlobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clintons foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed. But Obama says today of the intervention, It didnt work. The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefullyand yet the country is still a disaster. At that point, youve got Europe and a number of Gulf countries who despise Qaddafi, or are concerned on a humanitarian basis, who are calling for action. But what has been a habit over the last several decades in these circumstances is people pushing us to act but then showing an unwillingness to put any skin in the game. Free riders?, I interjected. Free riders, he said, and continued. So what I said at that point was, we should act as part of an international coalition. But because this is not at the core of our interests, we need to get a UN mandate; we need Europeans and Gulf countries to be actively involved in the coalition; we will apply the military capabilities that are unique to us, but we expect others to carry their weight. And we worked with our defense teams to ensure that we could execute a strategy without putting boots on the ground and without a long-term military commitment in Libya. So we actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billionwhich, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess. Mess is the presidents diplomatic term; privately, he calls Libya a shit show, in part because its subsequently become an isis havenone that he has already targeted with air strikes. It became a shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of Americas allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism. When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong, Obama said, theres room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libyas proximity, being invested in the follow-up, he said. He noted that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, lost his job the following year. And he said that British Prime Minister David Cameron soon stopped paying attention, becoming distracted by a range of other things. Of France, he said, Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to purchase Frances involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us. In other words, giving France extra credit in exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful trade-offexcept that from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If were going to do something, obviously weve got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight. Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics. The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure there that we could interact with and start training and start providing resources broke down very quickly. Libya proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa, he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. That would be a basic, fundamental mistake. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest
#1. To: A Pole, TooConservative, Vicomte13 (#0)
The postings are excerpts from the article. Amazing behind the scenes account. Obama trying to shift blame on Libya on the Europeans. Shows he was reluctant to go to war but was being pressured by globalist interventionists on the left and the right. To me it shows Obama had the right instincts to avoid war but poor ability to resist the American foreign policy establishment.
Obama wasn't tricked into anything. He was the one doing the tricking and this article supports him in creating the myth he was tricked.
Oh I meant that how he thinks he was tricked.
The emperor ,the chosen one ,the Nobel Peace Prize winner was tricked into going to war ? Samantha Power wrote 'A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide' long before she joined the emperor's regime . She is one of the key advocates of R2P and the emperor knew very well what he was getting with her and where her advice would lead. The truth is that the emperor has always been a hawk . Oh he made political hay by saying that Iraq was the bad war etc. And the idiots in the Nobel committee gave him the Peace Prize on the "HOPE " that he would live up to his rhetoric. The truth is that before he blew it(because he isn't very competent at war ) ,he expanded the war in Afghanistan . He has ordered or assisted in the attempts of regime change in Egypt ,Libya (where we fought a war without any attempt at Congressional approval) ,Syria and Ukraine . He has made a defacto alliance with the murderous 12ers in Tehran. He has ramped up tensions with Russia.He has greatly increased drone attacks in Syria, Iraq ,Pakistan ,Somalia ,Yemen . He is still trying to get a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt and other nations. It was the emperor who infused his administration with hawks like Susan Rice ,Evita (and her side-kick Richard Holbrooke) ;and took advice from the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski,and John Brennan,Madeleine Albright ,Joe Biden (who still itches for a war with Russia). He knew what he was getting with them. So it is a very weak argument to say he was "tricked " into the foreign policy he adopted . "If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools." Plato
I think he was nagged into it by Hillary, Rice and Powers. Non auro, sed ferro, recuperando est patria
I agree with - I was just stating what I felt was Obama's excuse. That Samantha Powers is a filthy war monger but for social rights reasons. Others in DC are just as interventionist but for other reasons.
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