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Showing posts with label commentary -- President Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commentary -- President Obama. Show all posts
President Obama, meeting Thursday with his National Security Council, wants more intelligence experts to see information intercepted by the National Security Agency. Credit Zach Gibson/The New York Times
For years, a clandestine U.S. intelligence team had tracked a man they knew was high in the leadership of al Qaeda — an operative some believed had a hand in plotting the gruesome 2009 suicide attack in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers.
Their pursuit was personal, and by early 2014, according to a source directly involved in the operation, the agency had the target under tight drone surveillance. “We literally had a bead on this guy’s head and just needed authorization from Washington to pull the trigger,” said the source.
Then something unexpected happened. While agents waited for the green light, the al Qaeda operative’s name, as well as information about the CIA’s classified surveillance and plan to kill him in Pakistan, suddenly appeared in the U.S. press.
While President Obama did reduce troops by 76 percent in Afghanistan and 97 percent in Iraq, he also sent 500 soldiers into Syria and is leaving office as the only president to serve two complete terms during wartime.
And even while soldiers were coming home, the brand of warfare was shifting, from boots on the ground to stealth machines in the sky. What sets the Obama war strategy apart is the sweeping and unilateral adoption of a shadowy fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles better known as drones.
Read more .... WNU Editor: This VICE News post has a video that summarises President Obama's drone policy. As to his military legacy .... he will be remembered as being the President who ushered in a new era of drone warfare that was regarded as science fiction only two decades ago.
If you dislike Barack Obama, the most convenient stick with which to whack his foreign policy has always been his use of military drones to kill American enemies in chronically anarchic parts of the Mideast and Somalia. A president who came into office hoping to put a friendlier face on American empire has made significant use of a global assassination technology that seems disturbingly uncircumscribed, not only by domestic laws and democratic oversight, but even by cost or inconvenience.
Drones are to the 21st century what the atomic bomb was to the 20th and the crossbow was to the 12th: a new class of weapon that inspires an emotional nightmare of indiscriminate and rising bloodshed. It is an idea that seems to demand the creation of new taboos. It almost seems to place us in that Twilight Zone episode where Billy Mumy acquires the ability to “wish” people “into the cornfield”.
From the standpoint of innocent non-combatants who might be killed in a drone attack, the horror of the drone is just the same as the horror of ordinary bombing, whether perpetrated by planes or ships or wearers of suicide vests. It can really be of no comfort to the dead to know that their destruction was endorsed by an independent committee, or followed some sort of secret adversarial trial.
WNU Editor: In all fairness it was President Bush who opened this Pandora's Box .... but President Obama has definitely raised it to a level that he will be always be remembered as the one who solidified it as a part of U.S. war policy and strategy.
President Barack Obama is photographed through the window as he speaks in the Oval Office during a conference call at the White House in Washington, June 2, 2014.
Kori Schake tries to keep the myth of “retreat” and “retrenchment” under Obama alive:
Once in office, Obama made it clear that his commitment to retrenchment extended much further. Time and again, he sought to limit or reduce U.S. involvement in conflicts overseas, even when circumstances changed in ways that led many—including some of his closest national security advisers—to advocate a more robust use of force.
When we review Obama’s record in detail, we see that he was usually unwilling to involve the U.S. as deeply in new conflicts and crises as hawks would have liked, but that isn’t what retrenchment means. He doesn’t have a “commitment to retrenchment,” and hasn’t presided over retrenchment. If he had, we could then debate whether that was appropriate and successful, but it never happened. I suspect hawks have to rail against the imaginary version of Obama’s foreign policy, because his real one consists of doing many of the things that they wanted him to do. If Obama’s foreign policy record is not very good, it is because he wrongly listened to the advice of interventionists too often rather than too little, and so we are treated to a fictional story about how “retrenchment” produced the failures that have actually come from intervention and meddling.
WNU Editor: When President Obama took the oath of the Presidency in 2008, the major U.S. wars were in Iraq and Afghanistan (and they were tempering down), and U.S. foreign military advisers were involved in only a handful of conflicts (i.e. Colombia, the Philippines, etc.). Today .... the Middle East has exploded with U.S. forces involved in numerous situations, the Afghan war is going badly, and U.S advisers are currently involved in over 30 conflicts and disputes (and growing). And while many of these conflicts have nothing to do with the U.S. .... the U.S. decision to get involved was done by President Obama .... and it is now his legacy. Will a President Trump pursue the same policy .... or a policy of retrenchment .... I do not know. President-elect rump's campaign rhetoric was always signalling a desire to reverse this trend .... I can only hope that he sticks to his better angels.
President Obama visited Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day in 2009. Section 60 is where many American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. Credit Luke Sharrett/The New York Times
A strategy that went from a “good war” to the shorthand “Afghan good enough” reflects the president’s coming to terms with what was possible in Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s advisers wrestled with an intractable problem in the spring and summer of 2015: How could they stabilize Afghanistan while preserving Mr. Obama’s longtime goal of pulling out the last American troops before he left office?
As it happened, the president solved the problem for them. In early August of that year, when Mr. Obama convened a meeting of the National Security Council, he looked around the table and acknowledged a stark new reality.
“The fever in this room has finally broken,” the president told the group, according to a person in the meeting. “We’re no longer in nation-building mode.”
What Mr. Obama meant was that no one in the Situation Room that day, himself included, thought that the United States — after 14 years of war, billions of dollars spent and more than 2,000 American lives lost — would ever transform Afghanistan into a semblance of a democracy able to defend itself.
As he raced across the country before the election, President Obama warned supporters about the stakes. “All the progress we’ve made over these last eight years,” he said, “goes out the window if we don’t win this election.”
Hillary Clinton, his anointed successor, did not win, and so now Mr. Obama will find out whether his prediction was just campaign hyperbole or if his legacy really has just gone out the window. Not only are specific initiatives like his health care and climate change programs at risk, but so, too, is the broader vision Mr. Obama articulated for America.
Suddenly, the progressive, post-racial, bridge-building society he promised has given way to an angry, jeering, us-against-them nation to be led by a new president who relishes reality-show name-calling with racial overtones. In none of Mr. Obama’s worst-case scenarios when he came to office was this the way he imagined leaving.
WNU Editor: The devastation of the U.S. Middle Class. Obamacare disappointment. The loss of political power for the Democrat Party on the national, state, and local scenes. A new Cold War with Russia. Being involved in about 35 conflicts around the world. The list is long .... and I doubt that future historians will be kind. But he is America's first black President .... and he will be remembered for that.
Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland presents President Barack Obama with the Nobel Prize medal and diploma during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Raadhuset Main Hall at Oslo City Hall in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009.
US President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks to the media on the situation in Iraq on the South Lawn of the White House, before his departure for vacation at Martha's Vineyard, in Washington August 9, 2014. — Reuters
While presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump loom horrifyingly larger, can we spare a little horror as U.S. President Barack Obama looms ever smaller? No, I’m not sorry he’s leaving. I’m alarmed at a series of recent foreign policy humiliations showing just how badly the incredible shrinking president has damaged America’s standing in this turbulent world of ours.
First, emerging from the back door of Air Force One at the G20 in China after local functionaries literally denied him a red carpet. Second, begging Russian President Vladimir Putin for help on Syria and getting chlorine gas. Third, being told off by the president of Turkey over American support for Kurds in Syria. Fourth, being cussed out by the president of the Philippines.
WNU Editor: I cannot think of one foreign government or leader that feels sorry/sad/disappointed that President Obama's term of office will soon be ending .... not one. But I can think of dozens who either do not care that he is leaving .... or are glad that he will soon be gone. President Obama may have connected with enough Americans to win the Presidency twice, but he definitely does not have that connection with the rest of the world.
On September 4-5, the G-20 held its annual summit in Hangzhou, China, President Xi Jinping’s home. G-20 summits tend to be meaningless, but this one appears to have been outright harmful. The signature event was when President Barack Obama’s Air Force One was not met with a staircase, and it went downhill from there.
During the global financial crisis in 2008-9, when the main economies in the world needed to come together to reassure global markets, the G-20 was relevant. Ever since, G-20 meetings have lacked significance.
Ironically, the G-20 summit communiqués have become both longer and emptier. This year’s communiqué was a delight for us connoisseurs. The G-20 declared in fourteen pages and forty-eight articles that they favored everything good and opposed everything bad. This communiqué makes United Nations General Assembly statements appear insightful and daring.
WNU Editor: This is what happens when you are in the unfortunate position of being a lame duck ..... everyone ignores you or they give you a polite hearing.
(CNN)President Barack Obama bade farewell to G20 leaders in Hangzhou, China, on Monday by reminding them they're living in "turbulent" times -- and he wasn't kidding.
His valedictory Asia tour, which moved on to Laos later in the day, is unfolding amid diplomatic slights and great power rivalries that reflect the unstable nature of the world Obama will bequeath to his successor in January.
The controversies reflect the way international politics is now a stew of many competing, rising or resurgent powers that see fewer reasons to simply fall into line behind the United States than was the case following World War II and the Cold War. And it may suggest that foreign leaders are now just as interested in who will sit in the Oval Office next as they are in Obama as he heads for the exit.
Obama is not only confronting regimes in Russia, China and North Korea that are at times openly hostile to Washington -- or at least willing to make clear they don't want to play by its rules -- but over the long weekend, he got headaches from allies as well, notably Turkey and the Philippines.
WNU Editor: This has not been a good week for the U.S. President on the international stage .... and now his trade pacts are unravelling .... In One Week, Obama’s Ambitious Trade Pacts Are Coming Apart(Patrick Smith, Fiscal Times). But his biggest problem from now to the end of his term is that he is a lame duck .... and the leaders of the world know that.
U.S. President Barack Obama, surrounded by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter (L) and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff USMC General Joseph Dunford, Jr., (R) delivers a statement from the Roosevelt Room on Afghanistan at the White House in Washington U.S. July 6, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
A series of promises to NATO, Baghdad and Kabul have solidified America’s continued war footing through the end of the Obama administration.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Ash Carter's visit to Afghanistan on Tuesday completed an extensive world tour of U.S. war policy, one that began Friday at a NATO summit in Warsaw to help celebrate the Cold War-era alliance's newfound relevance before continuing on with a surprise trip to meet with counterparts in Iraq. His trek culminated here, the heart of America's longest conflict.
Along the way, Carter has solidified through promises and plans what most Americans have feared since the rise of the Islamic State group and the resurgence of Taliban aggression, both amid political upheaval throughout the region: that President Barack Obama cannot follow through on his campaign pledges to end U.S. wars in the Middle East.
In truth, these conflicts are ramping up in intensity. And from Carter's perspective, there's no immediate end in sight to America's participation.
WNU Editor: The next President will be faced with one of three choices .... status quo, ramp up U.S. military involvement .... or leave. All three options will be costly for the next President ... and will occupy much of the next President's agenda. I am also willing to wager that the next President will be cursing President Obama privately for giving him this situation .... just as President Obama cursed and blamed President Bush for the mess he inherited when he walked into the Oval Office for the first time.
* Bill O'Reilly released images of President Barack Obama claiming they were from the Muslim wedding of his half brother Malik
* President Obama was Malik's best man at his first wedding in 1981 and Malik served as his best man when he married Michelle
* O'Reilly claims the photos were taken in Maryland in the early 1990s
* Fox News host said the pictures prove President Obama has 'deep emotional ties to Islam' and is not a 'devout Christian'
* O'Reilly claims this has 'hurt the USA' because Obama has failed to combat ISIS which he calls the 'Obama administration's greatest failure'
* A similar set of photos featuring President Obama in the same dress were shared by Malik in 2004 and previously published on DailyMail.com
Bill O'Reilly shared photos of Barack Obama in traditional Islamic dress on his program Wednesday night claiming they were from his half-brother Malik's wedding.
The Fox News host said it was 'very difficult' to verify the exact location of the photographs - a similar set of which were first released back in 2004 by Malik and previously published on DailyMail.com - but claimed they were taken in Maryland in the early 1990s.
'According to his half-sister, Barack Obama attended his half-brother's wedding in the early 1990s. Malik Obama was a Muslim,' said O'Reilly.
'The Factor has obtained pictures allegedly from that wedding, which we believe was held in Maryland.'
WNU Editor: This type of argument is not helpful when it comes to criticising and/or analysing President Obama's actions. Does President Obama have an emotional attachment to Islam .... I would not be surprised if he does .... but has this impacted U.S. foreign and military policy against Islamic terror groups .... I do not see it. What I do see (and have seen for 8 years) is a reluctant President who does not want an expanded military role for the U.S. in trouble spots like the Middle East and Afghanistan .... a position that is (by the way) overwhelming supported by the American people. Has this been a smart strategy .... in hindsight I would have to say probably not (even though I did .... and still do .... support this policy). But I am open for a debate, and the debate that we should have is ... should we be involved in the Middle East and in the wars that are tearing apart the Muslim community, and if yes what is the strategy for victory. Unfortunately .... a strategy for victory has not been articulated.... but what I do see is a policy to keep the status quo and give the problem to the next President.
On a side note .... wow ... according to this Daily Mail post President Obama's half-brother has 12 wives. In my experience having one girl friend is more than enough .... but 12 wives!!!! I cannot even contemplate that.
President Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 2009. Since then, he has tried to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Obama came into office seven years ago pledging to end the wars of his predecessor, George W. Bush. On May 6, with eight months left before he vacates the White House, Mr. Obama passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama’s term — a near-certainty given the president’s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria — he will leave behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.
Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln.
WNU Editor: It is not only all the wars that are now occurring .... but also how these wars may expand or spread that should be raising alarm bells. My biggest fear is that President Obama .... by trying his best to avoid major military confrontations .... may be giving the next President an environment where major wars will be the inevitable outcome of current U.S. policy. I hope that I am wrong .... but I have never seen the environment being what it is today where there are many players on the world scene who are now viewing military options as a solution to their political problems and/or policies.
President Obama, meeting Thursday with his National Security Council, wants more intelligence experts to see information intercepted by the National Security Agency. Credit Zach Gibson/The New York Times
There is much to unpack in Barack Obama’s remark to Jeffrey Goldberg that Saudi Arabia needs to “share” the Middle East with Iran. Note that he makes little distinction between the claims of an American ally and a state sponsor of terrorism, or their respective methods. It is the progressive’s equivalence, akin to Apple’s insistence that it cannot grant “backdoors” to the U.S. government even with a court order because then it would have to permit even the most repressive governments access to the data on people’s phones. President Obama has done a creditable job of engaging with American adversaries, creating opportunities for cooperation. Whether that is enough to balance the erosion of the international order caused by his policies—an erosion Obama would surely say is not his fault, and instead attributable to titanic, uncontrollable global trends—may prove the essential question surrounding his foreign-policy legacy.
In meeting after meeting this spring and summer, President Obama insisted that the last American troops in Afghanistan would return home by the end of his presidency, definitively ending the longest war in American history.
Obama and his closest foreign policy advisers laid out the reasons for his military commanders. Keeping as many as 10,000 troops in Afghanistan indefinitely at a cost of as much as $10 billion to $15 billion a year wasn’t politically feasible or financially responsible. There were more pressing domestic priorities that needed money. The country faced bigger threats.
Then, in August, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came in with one more plan to maintain a counterterrorism force of as many as 5,000 troops in Afghanistan to prevent a reemergence of al-Qaeda and to battle Islamic State fighters seeking a foothold in the country. Dempsey’s plan was a quick, back-of-the-envelope exercise, according to senior administration officials.
WNU Editor: Wars always end when the other sides realizes that it is hopeless to continue. In places like Iraq and Afghanistan .... President Obama may have wanted to leave these zones of conflict, unfortunately the enemy has different plans. And in places like Libya .... leaving behind a weak government with little support or backing is a guarantee that war and conflict would only continue and spread to its neighbours.
President Obama has only 16 months left in his term .... but I can now easily predict that many of the wars and conflicts that are brewing throughout the Middle East and North Africa will escalate to levels of bloodshed and violence that has not been seen for generations. And in places like Afghanistan, where the Taliban now feel that they are on the verge of seizing and holding territory .... the bloodshed that will occur will shock even those who have been harden by years of war. In this cauldron the next U.S. President will then be faced with a terrible choice .... send in tens of thousands of U.S. troops in all of these conflict zones.... or let the whole place explode. And when making his decision .... will reflect on what did President Obama do to get him (or her) into this mess .... just as President Obama has more than once in the past remarked on President Bush left him Iraq and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is returning to the forefront of U.S. politics, presenting President Obama with a legacy-defining question that could roil the Democratic and Republican races to succeed him.
A U.S. airstrike ordered by Afghan forces that inadvertently killed 22 people at a Doctors Without Borders hospital this weekend has amplified concerns that security forces are not ready to stand on their own two feet.
The turmoil in Afghanistan is presenting Obama with a painful choice: to go back on his promise to end the longest war in American history or press ahead with withdrawal over the advice of his top commanders.
WNU Editor: President Bush left office with the Iraq and Afghan wars as his legacy .... the impression that I am having of this White House when it comes to international affairs is that of a President and his supporters trying their best to keep everything from blowing-up in their faces. And while the last thing that President Obama wants to see on his watch is a major war and/or the complete implosion of Afghanistan and/or Iraq .... the trends are indicating otherwise, and what will happen in the next year will ultimately define his legacy.
On a personal note .... I cannot help but be stunned on how much the world has changed in just the past two to three years. All of the countries around the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East are now experiencing the following .... a state of civil war, facing war, experiencing terrorism and/or facing terror threats, social unrest, massive economic hardships, and mass migration at a level that has not been seen since the Second World War. The Post-Cold-War era in eastern Europe is also now at an end, and in its place we are seeing a new "Cold-War' descending with all of the tensions and dangers that it presents. And China .... asserting its territorial claims and putting fear in all of its neighbours, .... and doing so knowing that the U.S. is a declining power with limited influence in Asia. And then there is Afghanistan .... with no good options on the table .... and definitely no end to the fighting there.
President Obama speaks on the phone from the Oval Office, September 10, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
Special Report: How Syria Policy Stalled Under The 'Analyst In Chief' -- David Rohde and Warren Strobel, Reuters
(Reuters) - Throughout 2012, as signs mounted that militants in Syria were growing stronger, the debate in the White House followed a pattern. In meeting after meeting, as officials from agencies outside the executive residence advocated arming pro-Western rebels or other forms of action, President Barack Obama’s closest White House aides bluntly delivered the president’s verdict: no.
“It became clear from the people very close to the president that he had deep, deep reservations about intervening in Syria,” said Julianne Smith, who served as deputy national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. “And the likelihood of altering those views was low, very low.”
My Comment: Last year I was sympathetic to President Obama's decision (and lack of desire) to get American embroiled in another Middle Eastern war. There was no political or public support for another war .... and President Obama respected and agreed with that opinion. But quoting Trotsky ..... "you may not want war, but war wants you". Even I recognized (the end of last year) that the conditions on the ground had changed .... and radical Jihadists were gaining control and power at a rapid pace. Unfortunately .... the White House was slow and reluctant to get involved .... and we now have the situation that we have today.
This article and analysis is a devastating indictment from Reuters of President Obama's insular decision-making process on national security. It is in every-way a must read.
U.S. President Barack Obama pauses while speaking in the White House Press Briefing Room in Washington, June 8, 2012. Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing
For Obama, A Swift Leap From No Strategy To A Full Battle Plan For Islamic State -- Washington Post
After keeping his promise to avoid American involvement in extended wars for nearly six years, President Obama on Monday began a military engagement that he acknowledged is likely to far outlive his time in office.
The launch of airstrikes in Syria and expanded U.S. action in Iraq, at the head of a dozens-strong coalition of nations, is by far the biggest commitment of U.S. might Obama has made, far beyond 2011’s limited air action in Libya or the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
Yet his decision seemed all but inevitable as Islamic State militants publicly executed U.S. hostages and it became clear that extremist advances in Iraq — whose survival is key to a host of U.S. objectives in the Middle East — could not be reversed without direct intervention in Syria. Once decided, the plan commenced with head-spinning speed.
My Comment: Another critical article of President Obama .... so what I say. But this is from the Washington Post!!!!! If your allies and friends are beating you up .... that is when you know that you are in trouble.
President Obama on Wednesday in Washington. Mr. Obama says he is aware of the “political price” he pays for being deliberate. Credit Pool photo by Saul Loeb
Paths to War, Then and Now, Haunt Obama -- Peter Baker, New York Times
WASHINGTON — Just hours before announcing an escalated campaign against Islamic extremists last week, President Obama privately reflected on another time when a president weighed military action in the Middle East — the frenzied weeks leading up to the American invasion of Iraq a decade ago.
“I was not here in the run-up to Iraq in 2003,” he told a group of visitors who met with him in the White House before his televised speech to the nation, according to several people who were in the meeting. “It would have been fascinating to see the momentum and how it builds.”
In his own way, Mr. Obama said, he had seen something similar, a virtual fever rising in Washington, pressuring him to send the armed forces after the Sunni radicals who had swept through Iraq and beheaded American journalists. He had told his staff, he said, not to evaluate their own policy based on external momentum. He would not rush to war. He would be deliberate.
My Comment: Talk about being an apologist for the President .... this New York Times analysis goes overboard in every way. What can I say .... if you are supportive of the President's Middle East strategy ... you will applaud this New York Times post. If you are a critic .... be prepared to "throw-up". As to what is my take .... no applause and no "throwing-up" .... just rolling my eyes and remembering the days (early 1980s) when the New York Times was a semi-decent paper to read.
More White House Officials At Michael Brown’s Funeral Than Thatcher’s -- FOX News
The White House sent three officials to attend Monday's funeral for Michael Brown in St. Louis -- three more than it sent for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's funeral last year.
The administration's handling of the Brown funeral already has started to raise comparisons between the two.
For Monday's funeral, the White House sent two officials with the White House Office of Public Engagement as well as Broderick Johnson, chairman of the My Brother's Keeper Task Force.
My Comment: President Obama and his administration are clueless .... completely clueless. And the Islamic State .... who closely studies how we respond to events .... are taking note that this White House is telling the world that they do not want to be seen as someone who wants to antagonize the Islamic State.
I have been involved in numerous computer science projects since the 1980s, as well as developing numerous web projects since 1996.
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