Where to begin?
Barack Obama has screwed up Iraq so badly it’s hard to explain it. Today the US maintains military bases in Japan and Korea and Germany. It turned out to be a very good thing for the world. Obama was so bent on getting out of Iraq that he lost it. Obama’s fertilizer is growing a brand spanking new terrorist army. Iraq is descending into an apocalypse complete with inhuman atrocities courtesy of ISIS and Obama is playing golf. Obama has a SWAT Team protecting him during his rounds on the highly dangerous Martha’s Vineyard links.
The Obama apologista are out in force and it’s breathtaking to behold.
Politico tries to sell us the shiny new “Obama doctrine“:
“When we face a situation like we do on that mountain — with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale, when we have a mandate to help — in this case, a request from the Iraqi government — and when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye,” the president said.
Oh really? Back in 2007 genocide was fine with Obama:
Obama says don’t stay in Iraq over genocide
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.
Time magazine fall all over itself muttering something about how Obama has “evolved.”
In his 2007 comments about genocide, Obama at least seemed to imply that, because the U.S. can’t prevent slaughter everywhere, it shouldn’t take humanitarian action anywhere. But as President he has adopted a different point, first in Libya and now in Iraq: Just because we intervene in some places doesn’t mean we have to intervene everywhere.
Pathetic. Utterly pathetic. He was such a smartass, such a God Damn know-it-all before he was elected. Not he’s morphed into a cheap imitation of George Bush (absent a moral compass) and the left loves him for it.
John McCain says the pinprick strikes Obama has ordered are worse than nothing at all:
McCain, a consistent advocate for the application of American military power around the world, has long pushed for greater U.S. involvement in Iraq. But these strikes Friday were not what McCain had in mind.
“This is a pinprick,” McCain told The Daily Beast in an interview Friday, about the two 500-pound smart bombs U.S. airplanes dropped on ISIS convoys Friday. The vehicles were approaching Erbil, the capital city of Iraqi Kurdistan, were many U.S. diplomatic and military personnel reside.
“It’s almost worse than nothing because I fear the president is threatening and then he won’t follow through,” said McCain. “It’s the weakest possible response and we cannot allow them to take Erbil. What [the administration has] done so far is almost meaningless.”
Worst of all, it wasn’t for humanitarian reasons Obama is ordering pinprick strikes on ISIS- it’s all about the optics:
Looming over that discussion, and the decision to return the United States to a war Mr. Obama had built his political career disparaging, was the specter of an earlier tragedy: the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and has become a potent symbol of weakness for critics of the president…
…As the tension mounted in Washington, a parallel drama was playing out in Erbil. Kurdish forces who had been fighting the militants in three nearby Christian villages abruptly fell back toward the gates of the city, fanning fears that the city might soon fall. By Thursday morning, people were thronging the airport, desperate for flights out of town.
“The situation near Erbil was becoming more dire than anyone expected,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the White House’s internal deliberations. “We didn’t want another Benghazi.”
Barack Obama is always the king of the food fight. He claws his way to the front of the taking credit line and cannot be found when things go wrong.
Obama claimed to end the war but then whines that removing all forces was not his decision? Clearly, Obama is once again full of sh*t. If it was not his decision to remove all forces from Iraq, then it was George Bush’s SOFA. Obama only followed the Bush SOFA timeline. It was George Bush who ended the war, not Barack Obama. The failure to secure a new SOFA is Obama’s and no one else’s.
President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said.
Despite the astonishing brutality of ISIS, Obama is inexplicably not interested in defeating them:
Yet by the White House’s own account, the measures ordered by Mr. Obama are not intended to defeat the Islamic State or even to stop its bloody advances in most of the region. Instead they are limited to protecting two cities where U.S. personnel are stationed and one mass of refugees. The hundreds of thousands of people in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere threatened by the al-Qaeda forces will receive no U.S. protection. Nor will the terrorists’ hold over the areas they already control, including the large city of Mosul and nearby oil fields, be tested by U.S. airpower.
It is characteristic of Barack Obama to sweep problems under the rug and delay the pain of political decisions (i.e. employer mandate) and with regard to ISIS he is delaying the tough decisions. That could prove to be disastrous for the US.
Flashback:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLteUGkvpOc[/youtube]
Or maybe not.
I have said it here many times- hubris is not good economic, domestic or foreign policy.
Over at PJ Media Bridget Johnson wrote this:
Undaunted ISIS Begin Building Their New Caliphate Into a State
WASHINGTON — Since establishing their Islamic state, the terrorists who obliterated the border between Iraq and Syria have set about the business of turning their caliphate into an actual state.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) — now, since Sunday, known as the new caliph — issued a message Tuesday to the mujahidin and Muslim community chock full of Quranic verses and calls to arms.
“Muslims’ rights are forcibly seized in China, India, Palestine, Somalia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Caucasus, Shām (the Levant), Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Ahvaz, Iran [by the rāfidah (shia)], Pakistan, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, in the East and in the West,” al-Baghdadi, or Caliph Ibrahim, said. “So raise your ambitions, O soldiers of the Islamic State! For your brothers all over the world are waiting for your rescue, and are anticipating your brigades.”
Remember this?
Is Obama helping to build a global caliphate?
Not so far fetched now.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.