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Obama: Don't Do Stupid Wars

by Oui Fri Jan 24th, 2025 at 10:59:39 PM EST

Obama:
"don't do
stupid
wars"

Obama on Earlier 'Dumb' War Comment | 13 Dec 2011 |

One of the best summaries on the Legacy of Barack Hussein Obama ...

President Obama, who hoped to sow peace, instead led the nation in war | Los Angeles Times 19 Jan 2017 |

Before he took office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to end America's grueling conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his second term, he pledged to take the country off what he called a permanent war footing.

"Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue," he said in May 2013. "But this war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises. It's what our democracy demands."

But Obama leaves a very different legacy as he prepares to hand his commander-in-chief responsibilities to Donald Trump.


U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama's tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Yet the U.S. faces more threats in more places than at any time since the Cold War, according to U.S. intelligence. For the first time in decades, there is at least the potential of an armed clash with America's largest adversaries, Russia and China.

Obama slashed the number of U.S. troops in war zones from 150,000 to 14,000, and stopped the flow of American soldiers coming home in body bags. He also used diplomacy, not war, to defuse a tense nuclear standoff with Iran.

CYNICISM

A key moment in history from a relatively peaceful world to an age of confrontation and brutal wars killing hundreds of innocent lives ...  

George W. Bush hiding the body bags and flag draped coffins of U.S. military ... his legacy in a brief effusion:

"I don't keep count of the civilians
dying in Iraq ... our destiny is sealed
in victory under our Lord's blessing,"

Obama vastly expanded the role of elite commando units and the use of new technology, including armed drones and cyber weapons.

"The whole concept of war has changed under Obama," said Jon Alterman, Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit think tank in Washington.

Obama "got the country out of `war,' at least as we used to see it," Alterman said. "We're now wrapped up in all these different conflicts, at a low level and with no end in sight."

"The whole concept of war has changed under Obama."

A Reaper drone prepares for a mission in Afghanistan. Obama expanded the use of new technology, including armed drones and cyber weapons. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

The administration built secret drone bases and other facilities in Africa and the Middle East, and added troops and warships in the western Pacific. It also moved troops and equipment to eastern Europe to counter a resurgent Russia.

Along the way, Obama sometimes quarreled with his top military advisors. After they left the Pentagon, Obama's first three secretaries of Defense -- Robert M. Gates, Leon E. Panetta and Chuck Hagel -- accused the Obama White House of micromanaging the military.

Obama's political rise famously began with a speech he gave in Chicago in October 2002, when he announced he was "opposed to dumb wars," referring to the planned invasion of Iraq by the George W. Bush administration.

But as president, Obama found himself caught in the fierce cross currents of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings that roiled much of the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, leading to harsh crackdowns across the region. Only one country, Tunisia, ultimately saw a transition to democracy.

He reluctantly approved a NATO air campaign in Libya initially aimed at preventing massacres of civilians by strongman Moammar Kadafi.

Determined to avoid the kind of nation building that pulled the U.S. into Iraq's civil war, he withdrew after Kadafi was killed -- only to see the oil-rich country collapse in conflict and become a magnet for terrorist groups.

The danger was clear after members of the Islamic militant group Ansar al Sharia stormed a U.S. diplomatic compound and nearby CIA base in Benghazi, in eastern Libya, in September 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

The messy aftermath in Libya made Obama realize the limitations of military power in achieving U.S. goals, and that shaped the rest of his presidency, said Benjamin Rhodes, his deputy national security advisor.

"We can destroy things," Rhodes said. "He does not believe we can shape the trajectory of the internal politics of another country or the building of a new society."

A recently posted comment ... a rant

I don't know how much more proof the average US citizen needs to acknowledge they are living through a blitzkrieg of propaganda, I describe it as industrial scale propaganda the likes of which no ng human alive has experienced, No WW1 or 2 of Vietnam or even weapons of mass destruction compare. There was a vocal anti-war movement during the Iraq Wars.

Then along came (I don't do dumb wars, just drone wars") Obama and the Democratic Party killed the anti-war movement which was and is obviously fickle anyway, further eroded by Identity-politics suckering Black folks and Leftists along. See, we got Lloyd Austin! Hip, hip, hooray!

Today you have the ACLU being anti-democratic and anti-free speech when I remembered them representing Nazi's right to march in predominantly Jewish Skokie, IL .

The MSM, Big Tech, Legacy Media are way more effective than Pravda, Pravda didn't have social media denizens and cultural influencers that have been at the forefront of expanding Westerns Culture for decades. Pravda didn't have toys, and movies, and fast food restaurants and amusement parks and Disney and DreamWorks pushing American Exceptionalism Shiny City on the Hill, Biggest and Baddest, Bestest and the Brightest, Envy of the World on and on ....

Neither Pravda nor Goebbels could have imagined the tools and the symbiotic pieces and parts of Full Spectrum Propaganda. Thank God for [censored] web and Telegram and other outlets.

VIDEO Wesley Clark

"I'm not going to start Third World War for you," Jackson told Clark | The Guardian - 2 Dec 1999 |

That Brit Guy ... Timeless

Rolling over in laughter 😂 🤣

Should the US merge with the EU? | by ThatBritGuy - Oct 12th, 2006 |

In the silly (or possibly delusionally grand) thinking stakes, this idea has to be one of the silliest, or possibly one of the grandest.

It's certainly Orwellian - welcome to Oceania - but is it it really all that insane a suggestion?

The advantages of economic union would be obvious. Ignoring the false rhetoric about sclerotic European economies, the EU and the US together would become the biggest trading bloc in all of history. But that would be just the start of the benefits.

Politically, a lot of the current problems in the US have arisen because the fundies, with their roots in the Deep South, have managed to game the system to become disproportionately influential. With democracy spread across a much wider area, with a much wider range of interest groups, their influence would be diluted back into obscurity.

While the EU has issues with Far Right movements of its own, it's difficult to imagine these being ideologically compatible with their equivalents in the US.

They might eventually work out a way to coalesce, but within that time it would be possible to build a solid more moderate consensus. 😂

Another advantage is that without a merger, the US and the EU can only head for outright conflict sooner or later. The present political balances aren't sustainable. So far the EU has been happy to roll over and accept US demands, but there are areas of friction and with a more motivated EU parliament it's not hard to imagine that these could grow.

Realistically, China is already flexing its muscles [updated link - Oui] and more advanced plans for conflict with the US and possibly the EU, with both conventional and economic modes, will surely be sitting on a Chinese government hard drive somewhere.

Combining the EU and US is very possibly the only realistic way of containing Chinese ambitions. The US is not in a position to opt for isolationism, and current big-ticket military spending is wasting huge sums on military technology that won't ever be used, designed for a style of war that's already obsolete. Pooling EU and US resources and innovative skills would help immeasurably in creating effective deterrents.

There are other obvious advantages to thinking the unthinkable. Currently it's hard to imagine anyone in the US or the EU taking the idea seriously, and at this stage of the game the plan has 'Ain't gonna happen' all over it.

But union between France and Germany would have been just as unthinkable a couple of generations ago, and the EU in general would never have been considered a plausible idea.

So - what's to lose by raising the suggestion now?

The real question should have been ... how likely the U.S. would divide and conquer Europe through Big Money - Big Tech .. Destroying remnants of Socialism ... WTF do Europeans think they are ... Americas owns the NATO Trojan Horse riding into London ending up in Kyiv. Mercenaries, proxy warfare ... no more American lives lost on the battlefield and flag draped coffins of our heroes.

Something like a brainchild ... should Europe be converted to the religion of violence in the New World, or should the United States convert to the founding principles of the ECC and EU ... trade and business ties YES ... FDR's Four Freedoms and forego wars of choice. No to war ‼️ ☮️

White supremacy, another term for exceptionalism, will not tolerate a sovereign Europe with their own Army, Navy and Air Force.

Dream On!

[Update-1]

No American lives were lost during my four years as President and commander-in-chief

ILLUSOIR

Joe Biden’s Interrupted Presidency | The New York Times |

He sought the office nearly all his life. When he finally got there, it brought out his best — and eventually his worst.

As he takes the stage on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, both outcomes remain possible. His legacy — once that of a skilled legislator who then became the able No. 2 man to the nation’s first Black president — is now tied to that of Kamala Harris, his vice president and understudy who has taken center stage. Should Harris win in November, becoming the first female president, Biden may best be remembered as a president who did not so much make history as facilitate it, twice over, and who also helped deny Trump’s two quests for a second term, first by beating him and then by stepping back so that a more able Democratic candidate could do the job. That Joe Biden could end up being, as he once put it, a human “bridge” to history marks a final plot twist in my reporting for this article, which began weeks before Biden’s career-ending debate and includes interviews with more than two dozen current and former Biden advisers, legislators and other Democratic allies.

The sorry state of Blue America …

Joe left Kamala a burden no one could carry … ugly defeat for America and democracy.

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