Honestly, I haven't had time to keep up with it outside of the headlines and a few news segments I've caught. I am opening a new furniture store and have been in the throws of it for the past few weeks. I have heard some of the criticism of Obama's handling of the situation from both conservatives and democrats (for different reasons of course) and I've been pretty vocal about the fact that Obama should not have drawn a red line if he had no intention of enforcing it. All of that said, if we are going to use George W Bush's and Dick Cheney's cowboy diplomacy as the standard then, yes, I suppose to a guy like you Obama does appear weak. However, prior to our good buddy GWB, our foreign policy has always been far more nuanced and handled accordingly. I believe that Obama was proposing to use a stick with the knowledge that the Russians and Iranians DO NOT want an armed conflict with the US and they would back off and be willing to accept a carrot instead. If so, then it worked. This approach is nothing new to US foreign diplomacy. The threat of the world's largest, most advanced military beating down your door can motivate people to do all kinds of new things. But, being a superpower doesn't always mean that you drop your pants and dick-whip your opponent, in fact, a good deal of restraint and calculation should be hallmarks of great powers like us. Reagan understood, probably better than most, that the threat of military power is often the straightest line to peace. A better question is this: did we get the desired results? Are the Syrian chemical weapons going to be secured by a third party? Are we going to avoid having to use American resources to disarm the Syrians? I guess, in fairness, we won't know the answer to those questions until we are on the other side of this thing. Regarding Putin, it's obvious that he is an old cold warrior who can't get over the fact that we won and they lost. Is Putin or Russia any real military threat to us? Hell no, not even close and Putin knows that better than anyone else. All he has are little parlor games like writing op-eds in the NYT. I likened his op-ed to a video rant by Osama Bin Laden, except that guys like you actually put stock in what he has to say because you think, just for a second, that you might be able to use it to poke your finger in the President's eye.
Sorry, I missed this post last week. The minimized quotes feature of the new system made me think you hadn't responded. All you have to do to break out a piece of a quote is to place the text between the bracketed QUOTE and /QUOTE commands . . . The map is from last spring. The rebel-controlled ares are not desert. Uninhabited desert is shown uncolored. The rebels hold the Euphrates valley and the fertile areas of north Syria. Every major city has rebel-controlled suburbs including Damascus. If you are paying attention, you will observe that this war has gone back and forth several times. Syria made a summer offensive and took some ground using air strikes and chemical weapons, but it stalled and the rebels simply relocated. This is typical of insurgencies. Guerrillas don't utilize front lines or allow themselves to be besieged. They have no capability nor reason to try to "hold" territory. When the enemy concentrates and makes an offensive, they melt away, save their resources and pop up somewhere else. Guerrilla insurgencies are not about "taking ground" but about taking power and influencing events. Remember Vietnam and Afghanistan. Note all of the green circles on the map deep inside "Assads territory". The rebels move frequently and make as much trouble for the Syrian army as they can without trying to stand and fight against armored brigades and airpower. The Syrian army simply can't overwhelm the rebels everywhere. They can't even hold the ground everywhere, obviously and have abandoned half the country. Plus they are steadily getting fewer supplies and munitions, which armies in the field rip though very rapidly. So they have to pull back near their bases and supply lines. Then the rebels simply return. I repeat. Assad is not winning. Guerrillas win by just not going away. And they are not going away. They are gaining Arab and Western support, while Assad is losing the same support. Assad's only allies, Russia and Iran, are both engaged in disarmament talks with the United States . . . and they are the ones who initiated new contact. Assad is feeling lonely for a reason. And I gave you a long list of foreign policy achievements. Where is your list of "failures". Benghazi is all you've got and it amounts to damn little. It doesn't hold a candle to Dubya's phony war or Reagan's trading arms with the enemy or Carters waffling or . . . Give me a list of such incidences. I've already given you a long list of Obamas foreign policy successes. In which of them did he not lead from the front? Be specific. The only situation where Obama did not take the lead was in the overthrow of Quadaffi. Britain and France and the Europeans were clamoring for action because they are oil trading partners with Libya right in their own backyard. Obama insisted that the US was engaged in two wars already and that it was time for the allies to step up to the plate and take responsibility for attacking Libya. And it made good sense. We are not the worlds policeman and the rest of the West is living large while American lives and treasure is committed protecting the free world. Still, Obama had to commit large US forces to make it work in the long run. Just like Clinton did in Bosnia and Serbia. He made NATO step up and deal with the problem on their doorstep but still stepped in when they couldn't get it done and won it for them. The United States leads from wherever it stands. What ground? Where is this "vacuum" that you speak of. Who has filled it? What evidence of a vacuum do you see? Be specific. We have not lost any superpower respect and have regained much that was lost under Bush. Iran and North Korea are isolated. Russia is all hat and no cattle. Arabs are throwing off their old tyrants, to our delight. Better, they are increasingly focused on internal matters instead of jihad. Al Qaeda is defanged. The Chinese have snowballing domestic problems that will render them no threat anytime soon. The Palestinians are on their own and nobody is coming to help them. Our enemies certainly don't think we've disappeared. What fucking vacuum?
In fairness to him, I would have probably felt safe to make that statement not thinking any "leader" would be cruel enough to do that to their own people in this day and age. Bush was a POS too. He was a weak prick raised with a golden spoon in his mouth. He rode into the White House on his dad's coattail. I always felt like going after Sudam was all about avenging his father's demise for not killing him. That dumbfounded look when he received the news of the terrorist attack is a good snapshot of how he touched and felt around in his presidency. He also royally screwed up handling of Katrina. I was so mad knowing American citizens were left to live in third world country conditions for so long after the storm. His No Child Left Behind bullshit legistlation was a joke too. His cracker ass doesn't know what it's like for a kid to not give a dam about school/homework because the Friday lunch in the school cafeteria is the last one he will have until Monday comes around. Or to go "home" to a building with several siblings sharing a room, grandma living there and mom's boyfriend who occassionally beats the dog shit out of her. Maybe not but his flirting with these other people who want to smoke our ass so bad concerns me.
