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Is Obama a War Criminal?
Like many other auditors, Howie Carr of The Boston Herald was perplexed after he listened to Barack Obama’s televised address on Wednesday night. He cannot understand, any more than can you or I, how the President can deny that ISIS — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — is Islamic. He could have added that it was also rather odd that the President of the United States denied that ISIS is a state. “What,” we might ask, “does a state do that ISIS does not now do?” And Carr was no less nonplussed when Secretary of State John Kerry denied that we were going to war against ISIS, resorted to euphemism, and asserted that what we are about to become engaged in is “a very important counter-terrorism operation.”
“Does that,” Carr asks, “make it … a police action? Will we have to destroy the village in order to save it?”
It’s all very confusing. When George W. Bush considered invading Iraq without a declaration of war, the Democrats wanted to try him for war crimes in The Hague. When Obama does the same thing … crickets.
Which raises another question: Where exactly is the anti-war movement?
Have you see a single “No Blood for Oil” sign in Cambridge?
To paraphrase the John Kerry of 2004: “Can I get me a candlelight vigil here?”
Whatever happened to Cindy Sheehan? Where is Code Pink? I haven’t seen an “EndLESS War” bumper sticker in years, since 2009 to be exact.
The anti-war movement is MIA as this war, er, counterterrorism operation, begins. Back when Bush was waging war, dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now it’s “racism.” If you speak truth to power in the Obama era, they call it hate speech. The IRS will audit you.
Obama’s media sycophants described his prime-time speech as “nuanced.” I’d call it ragtime.
I thought the moonbats didn’t want the U.S. “going it alone.” You hear that phrase on the networks now about as often as you hear the words “full employment.”
And why is the president so outraged about a couple of beheadings? When a Muslim terrorist yelling “Allahu akbar!” murdered 13 servicemen at Fort Hood, Obama shrugged it off as “workplace violence.”
Now Obama’s suddenly “all wee-wee’ed up” about non-Muslim Muslims murdering Americans.
Flag-draped coffins at Dover AFB are no longer a feature of the nightly news. Remember Wolf Blitzer’s nightly trumpeting of Bush’s plummeting approval ratings?
Now the polls are so bleak for the Kenyan Katastrophe, CNN doesn’t even mention them anymore. . . .
Can I get me a “War Is Not the Answer” bumper sticker here? Not in Cambridge I can’t.
I quote Carr at length because his latest column is a tour de force. To be fair, however, Obama has attracted some criticism from the left. On Friday, Bruce Ackerman did write in The New York Times the following: “President Obama’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.” And, in making his point, Ackerman rightly pointed out that Bush twice sought and got Congressional authorization for what he did when he initiated — let’s not kid ourselves — wars . . . in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There is, of course, this difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The former invaded Afghanistan and Iraq on a calculation (right or wrong) that upsetting and reordering the status quo in those countries would make the United States more secure. The latter announced — and I emphasize the speech act because this President systematically confuses word with deed — that we would be bombing ISIS on a calculation that such an announcement might help his party in the November election.
Barack Obama really does have a strategy. But it has nothing to do with the security of the United States and its citizens. His aim, as he put it late in the presidential contest in 2008, is “to fundamentally change America.” That is why he called his administration The New Foundation. He has always regarded international affairs as a distraction from the revolution he wants to carry out here at home, and he has done abroad what he has done — killing Osama bin Laden, firing missiles at suspected adherents of Al Q’aeda, and the like — chiefly in order to fend off such distractions. He is not called No-Drama Obama for nothing.
But when the leaders of ISIS had James Foley and Steven Sotloff beheaded, they made of themselves a distraction that could not be ignored; and the speech delivered Wednesday night was a desperate attempt to fend it off and to rally the American people behind the President . . . and his party.
In thinking about all of this, we should not engage in tomfoolery. The United States has no military strategy in the Middle East. The men in uniform told the President that, in the absence of American boots on the ground, the situation was hopeless; and, mindful of the trouble that putting boots on the ground would cause him domestically, above all within his own party, he rejected their advice. What we saw on Wednesday night was another of Obama’s gestures. What we saw was a pose carefully calculated — executed by a poseur unexcelled.
So the question in my title is, in fact, legitimate. Is killing people via bombing strikes a war crime if it serves no larger strategic purpose, if it is a feckless act apt only to enrage against us those Sunnis who desperately fear the Shia, if it is a cynical maneuver aimed solely at improving the President’s standing in the polls? It is, after all, one thing to seek victory and another to engage in aimless mayhem.
Consider this. Why did the President not seek Congressional authorization? There is no question that Congress would have voted to approve military operations in Iraq and Syria. But, had the President asked for authorization, there would have been a problem. There is a faction in the Democratic Party — the faction that made Barack Obama, rather than Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2008. Its most resolute members would have voted against the resolution; and the party split, which would have been bitter, would have further depressed Democratic turnout in November. With this President, domestic political calculations trump everything else.
Mark my words. We as a nation are in for further embarrassment. The chief reason why the Framers gave us a unitary presidency rather than a committee was that they recognized the need in foreign affairs for secrecy, vigor, and dispatch. What they did not foresee was that someday, in a fit of mad self-indulgence, we would elect and then re-elect a President who — in his hostility to the regime they established — would subordinate his handling of international affairs to his personal goal of destroying what they had built.
All of this is apt to end in tears — and not just for you and me. For short-term expedients — such as the half-hearted program outlined in Wednesday night’s speech — rarely, if ever, produce anything but further trouble. The war in Iraq and Syria really is a war of Barack Obama’s making. Had he kept a body of troops in Iraq to encourage Maliki to honor the arrangements he had worked out with the Kurds and the Sunni, Al Q’aeda in an even more malevolent form would not have made a comeback. Had he vigorously backed the secular reformers in Syria, Bashar al-Assad would have been ousted some time ago, and ISIS would never have secured a foothold. His fecklessness in the past is now, however, going to be compounded by his fecklessness in the present. We — and he — are bound to suffer further humiliation.
The President no doubt supposes that he will be able to extricate himself from the consequences of his folly by further speech-making. He is adept with his tongue, and our servile media will doglike come to the man’s aid. But, in this regard, Barack Obama is like the little boy who cried, “Wolf!” The time is coming when only the most slavish and shameless of his partisans will pay him heed.
Published in General
When exactly did the enemy surrender and what were the terms of that surrender. Petraeus, GWB’s righthand man promised in sworn testimony we could, ” avoid an undesirable outcome,” and I don’t think even that vague, moderate goal was met. Victory – I think not. BHO inherited a bad situation and made it worse. I’ll buy that. Both men probably have what they view as “the long term interests of the country” in mind, although I would guess their idea of what these interests might be would be quite different. Both also put a high value on their own self interests. I don’t know what truly motivates either one of them. Wise and dedicated to public service, seems to me to say something positive about the person’s motivation. I would hesitate to apply it to either man. I don’t hate Bush, I think he is probably a nice guy who greatly overestimates his own abilities and wisdom. In other words an incompetent buffoon that got a lot of people killed unnecessarily.
What we did in Bush’s last two years is to crush an insurgency and to forge a coalition government within a democratic system that offered Iraqis the chance for a periodic correction of course. That was a very considerable victory. Bush can be faulted for dropping the ball before 2006. He stood idly by while subordinates not in sympathy with his aims subverted his policy. After 2006, he showed what he was made of. Obama took a pretty good situation and turned it into a disaster. Now, as I hope to point out in a follow-up post, we have no good options in that corner of the world.
I would take a slightly different take on what happened pre-2006. There were essentially 2 camps within the administration: the Rumsfeld/Cheney camp, advocating a light footprint and reliance on local allies bolstered by air power and special ops forces; and the Rice/Powell camp, advocating a heavy footprint with direct American action. (btw, if you want to make a lefty’s head explode, highlight the alignment of the present “strategy” to the Rumsfeld/ Cheney approach).
Either probably could have worked, but Bush’s problem is that he did not force a choice between one or the other until 2006, so we were left in a situation where the Rice/Powell approach was attempted with Rumsfeld/Cheney resourcing. The surge was at its essence an re-alignment of objectives, resourcing and approach in what became a coherent strategy. Incidentally, if you don’t have those 3 things identified and aligned, you have a jumble of activities, not a strategy.
Let’s explode a few lefty heads!
In the small town of Healdsburg in Northern California, a group of anti-war protesters continues to assemble every Thursday night by the town plaza, as they have every Thursday night since the second Gulf war began. I can respect their consistency. But the group assembled was a whole lot bigger during the Bush years.
The whirlwind is going cyclonic and we are it’s destination. The 2012 election has set in motion some harsh consequences for America.
Yes, alas. it is China that I fear the most. This is not over.
Here, in Hillsdale, there were two who appeared each weekend near the courthouse. One disappeared when BHO became President. Then, after a few months, the other dropped out.
Though temped I will not list the mistakes made and just deal with 2006. Getting the Shia militias to to pretend to disband was an accomplishment. Iran may have had more to do with this than GWB, but I’ll credit GWB. The Suni Radicals were forced to abandon their overt tactics in favor of more covert ones which did result in a reduction of violence in the territories they were operating in. This also was an accomplishments. I’ll grant you if the US was willing to keep 10-20K troops in Iraq for 3-4 generations, during which time they would be taking low levels of causalities, the country might eventually have a peaceful functioning democracy. Bush could could have tried to negotiate an agreement that would have provides for something like this, but he did not. An emery that is killed or an enemy that surrenders is defeated. No defeat no victory. I’m not familiar with this crushing concept. Sounds like something losers talk about.
In my judgment, a decade or so with 10-20,000 troops would have been sufficient. Al A’Qaeda was crushed; its leader was killed. The Sunni tribes, which had switched sides, remained. What do you think would have happened had we withdrawn from Germany in 1946?
A decade? After the surge Iran was more active and influential than before the surge. They would not have done anything to disrupt this 10 year nation building dream? The vicious anti-US Shia militia would have also remained on the side lines? A’Qaeda was severely weakened, but its members in Iraq were, I think, far from crushed (I guess crushed means something less than dead). What ever it means I think ISIS shows it is not a terminal condition. Would they have regrouped and come back as quickly and strongly. I don’t think so, but neither would they have been inconsequential. Add to the above, the centuries old SUNI/Shia animosity, the lack of any democratic history except for the recent past, the tribal culture, three plus decades of persecution suffered by the Shia under Sunni control and the absence of any appreciation for the western concept for ” the rule of law”, makes the idea of a decade almost a joke. I think the only possible positive outcome in Iraq would require a 10-20K or more US residual force and I fault Bush for not negotiating an agreement. BHO could have easily had and agreement and chose not to. I doubly fault him. however, trying to paint a post-surge Iraq as some sort of fledgling democracy is pollyanna-ish. I think leaving ground forces was the least bad decision. That is what we a faced with now, deciding what is the least bad decision. That is Bush’s legacy and more than likely will be Obama’s also.