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Charles Krauthammer takes off on the boundless cynicism of the president.
By early 2011, writes former defense secretary Robert Gates, he had concluded that President Obama “doesn’t believe in his own [Afghanistan] strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his.”
Not his? America is at war and he’s America’s commander in chief. For the soldier being shot at in the field, it makes no difference under whose administration the fighting began. In fact, three out of four Americans killed in Afghanistan have died under Barack Obama’s command. That’s ownership enough.
Moreover, Gates’s doubts about Obama had begun long before. A year earlier, trying to understand how two senior officials could be openly working against expressed policy, Gates concluded that “the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work.” This, just four months after Obama ordered his 30,000 troop “surge” into Afghanistan, warning the nation that “our security is at stake . . . the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”
The odd thing about Gates’s insider revelation of Obama’s lack of faith in his own policy is that we knew it all along. Obama was emitting discordant notes from the very beginning. In the West Point “surge” speech itself, the very sentence after that announcement consisted of the further announcement that the additional troops would be withdrawn in 18 months. …
…“If I had ever come to believe the military part of the strategy would not lead to success as I defined it,” writes Gates. “I could not have continued signing the deployment orders.” The commander in chief, Gates’s book makes clear, had no such scruples.
Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor posts on Putin’s latest kiss to Iran.
Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The Obama administration is attempting to one-up Marx and compress the process, with its simultaneously farcical and tragic policies on Iran and Syria.
Obama is clearly so dead set on achieving some legacy building agreement with Iran that he is willing to swallow any insult. Such as the announcement of a Russian-Iranian agreement whereby Iran will provide oil to Russia, in exchange for Russian goods–but more likely, Russian money as well. …
… Russia says that there are no internationally agreed upon sanctions, so it is perfectly free to deal with Iran.
That’s probably true in legal terms, but note that was true yesterday, and last month, and last year. But Putin didn’t do this. Until now. Because he sees that Obama is so desperate for a deal that he knows that he can get away with pretty much anything, and that Obama won’t do or say a damned thing. (And no, State Department expressions of “concern” don’t count.) So Putin and the Iranians are basically doing donuts on the White House lawn, with their windows down and their middle fingers up. And Obama just draws the drapes in the Oval Office. …
… Syrians are paying a dreadful price for Obama’s narcissism every day. The entire region is paying a price, because the festering sore in Syria is the host to myriad jihadists who range from the bad (the Islamic Front) to the terrible (the Al Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front) to the utterly bestial (ISIS/ISIL). The US and its allies (notably Israel) haven’t paid the price yet, but Obama has sowed the wind, and we will reap the whirlwind in due course. An empowered, messianic Iran, with Russia providing money and cover, and convinced that the US is a paper tiger, is likely to take actions that will unleash a devastating sequence of events. It’s a matter of when, not if.
But Obama will have secured peace in our time: or his time, more precisely. His legacy will be secured, and any malign consequences that occur in 2017 and beyond, well, those will obviously not be his fault. He gave us peace, after all, and if war comes, it will be because some lesser being screwed up.
Farcical tragedy. Tragical farce.
Daily Beast London Editor Nico Hines has the courage the U. S. media lacks. Hines posts on Brit opinions about the president.
Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the president’s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America’s position in the world.
President Obama is “chronically incapable” of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain’s most senior military advisors.
Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels “has left them in a far worse position than they were before.”
The extraordinary critique by a leading advisor to the United States’ closest military ally comes days after Obama was undermined by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who questioned the President’s foreign policy decisions and claimed he was deeply suspicious of the military. …
Ed Morrissey posts on the Senate’s bi-partisan committee report on Benghazi.
… One does not need a name at the top of this report to know where responsibility rests for this massive failure. Hillary Clinton ran State, Leon Panetta ran Defense, and David Petraeus ran the CIA. But the distributed nature of the failure indicts the Obama administration and Barack Obama himself, too. The White House is responsible for interagency coordination, for one thing, especially when it comes to national security and diplomatic enterprises.
However, Obama’s responsibility extends farther and more specifically, too. The reason that eastern Libya had transformed into a terrorist haven in the first place was because of the Obama-led NATO intervention that deposed Moammar Qaddafi without any effort to fill the security vacuum his abrupt departure created.
Four months before the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Daniel Larison warned that the vacuum left by that 30,000-foot intervention not only meant trouble for the West in eastern Libya, but throughout North Africa as al Qaeda and its affiliates entrenched themselves. Sure enough, al Qaeda infused itself into a Tuareg rebellion and almost topped Mali, an effort which France belatedly stamped out with a boots-on-the-ground intervention – with those boots transported in part by the US Air Force. At the time, the Financial Times called Mali “among the most embarrassing boomerangs” of American policy, specifically noting “the blowback in the Sahel from the overthrow of Colonel Moammar Gaddafi in Libya.”
The policies and actions of the Obama administration in Libya left behind a failed state, and the incompetent handling of security and readiness afterward left four Americans to die needlessly. The buck stops at the top for this mess.
Joel Kotkin, normally writing on economic geography, has written a provocative piece on failures of technology.
Technological advances have slowed from revolutionary to incremental, with a focus more narcissistic than expansive and with the rewards concentrated in ever-fewer hands.
Maybe it’s my age, but, somehow, the future does not seem to be turning out the way I once imagined. It’s not just the absence of flying cars, but also the lack of significant progress in big things, like toward space colonization, or smaller ones, like the speed for most air travel or the persistence of poverty.
Indeed, despite the incessant media obsession with technology as the driver of society, it seems we are a long way from the kind of dramatic change that, say, my parents’ generation experienced. Born at the end of the horse-and-buggy age, they witnessed amazing changes – from the development of nuclear power and the jet engine to the first moon landing.
In contrast, my children’s experience with technological change is largely incremental – a shifting of digital platforms, from desktops to laptops to tablets and iPhones. The new raft of minidevices are ingenious and much more powerful than even the high-end desktop computers of a decade ago. But this wave of technology is not doing much except, perhaps, to make us ever more distracted, disconnected and obsessed with trivia.
As one former Facebook employee put it succinctly: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
One clear sign of our technological fail: the stagnant, or even declining, living standards for most Americans. New technology is not creating much-cheaper and better housing, nor is it reducing poverty or creating a new wave of opportunity for grass-roots businesses. In fact, the current “tech boom” has done little to improve incomes much outside a few stretches of the Bay Area, a handful of college towns, and overhyped city media districts. …