9 thoughts on “Obama Foreign-Policy Failures”

  1. Anyone who attempts to list Joe Biden’s bad judgments better have a blog of infinite length.

    Unfortunately, 20 members of the unit known as Seal Team 6, which took out Bin Laden, were outed by Biden. They died soon after, very likely as a direct result.
    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/bidens_betrayal_of_seals_should_doom_presidential_run.html

    This is the same Joe Biden who outed the location of his own bunker. He’s not a man who can be trusted to tie his own shoes, let alone have access to anything important.

  2. I disagree with the notion that Obama lost Iraq and Afghanistan. Both wars were a quagmire to begin with. I also disagree with the concept that the Iran nuclear deal was a bad idea and I suspect we will see the evidence of that over the next decade.

    1. Only Iraq’s southeast marshes were a literal quagmire. Most of the rest of those two countries are just deserts and mountains.

      “Quagmire” is an interesting word that used to mean swamp and came to mean a bogged down military effort.

      But before I go into the details (because I’m bored and otherwise writing code to check fuel numbers on a Mars ascent vehicle) there is another very interesting word in the OED that we somehow skipped.

      Afghanistanism: noun – Preoccupation (especially on the part of journalists) with distant events, as a diversion from controversial domestic issues.

      Origin
      1940s. From the name of Afghanistan (Persian Afġānistān, Pashto Afġānistān), used as a type of a distant land + -ism.

      How did that term not make a comeback?!

      But anyway, we were treated to endless repeats of the term “quagmire” almost as soon as we rolled into Iraq. I think that word was first used to refer to Vietnam because we kept seeing images of infantry wading up to their chests, and “quagmire” means “swamp”. It shouldn’t be a good fit for Iraq or Afghanistan.

      The modern usage was popularized in the book title “The Making of a Quagmire” by David Halberstam (1965). His quagmire theory of the war resonated, and Arthur Schlesinger, in his own subsequent book, said “the quagmire metaphor represented the one-step-at-a-time process that the U.S. inadvertently became entrapped in the military and diplomatic swamp of Vietnam.”

      However, I wonder if Halberstam coined the new meaning from reading about WW-I, as it also appears in the Jan 18, 1918 edition of the Brisbane Courier.

      THE FLANDERS QUAGMIRE.
      Enemy troops still arriving.
      Germans conserving ammunition
      LONDON, Wednesday.

      The United Press correspondent on the
      West Front telegraphs: Rain, driven
      before a gale, is drenching the Front,
      and has transformed Flanders into a
      quagmire. Captured documents show
      that enemy troops from the East are
      arriving, and in the meanwhile the
      enemy is conserving his ammunition and
      other material wherever possible. An
      order to Prince Ruprecht’s army group
      blames the commanders for wastage in
      the recent fighting, and declares: “Some
      field gun batteries fired 3450 rounds on
      Monday, lights field howitzers 3100
      rounds, and heavy field howitzers 1600
      rounds This is overmuch, rendering
      accurate shooting impossible, and wears
      out the guns, hence an unusual per-
      centage is out of commission.” The
      order demands the most careful con-
      servation of material throughout.

      The body text uses “quagmire” to specifically mean a muddy bog, caused by rain, but the headline “The Flanders Quagmire” could be read as the modern usage, or read as the then accepted usage. I imagine a lot of later books covering the fighting in Flanders and Ypres might have similarly used the term.

      Since it was an unusual word in American English, maybe it stuck in Halberstam’s head, or in the head of someone he talked to, to denote an army that is stuck in the mud, forever, and unable to move forward or extract itself. I doubt press reports from WW-II or Korea would have had a reason to use the term’s original meaning, yet if they used the modern meaning the word wouldn’t be traced back to David Halberstam.

    2. I disagree with the notion that Obama lost Iraq and Afghanistan.

      I agree. They would be actually lost, not merely rhetorically lost. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t try.

      I also disagree with the concept that the Iran nuclear deal was a bad idea and I suspect we will see the evidence of that over the next decade.

      Hopefully Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt won’t be trying to develop their own nuclear programs in ten years as a result. But we’ll see.

    3. The Iran nuclear deal was so bad that President Obama didn’t even try to get the Senate to ratify it. I suspect he used the pen and phone approach as a favor to Valerie Jarrett.

    4. So? You also claimed oil would rise because of tension with Iran; accept they continue to fall since you made that claim. The global market disagrees with you.

    5. What Obama did with what he was handed in Iraq and what happened after he enable Islamists all over the ME is on him. He judged that Islamists were cool people who would do cool things and they brought death and suffering to every country they touched. The destruction went far beyond the ME and destabilized all of Europe.

      On Afghanistan, he engaged in fatalism. If one believes that nothing can be done, then one wont do anything, so he left our troops swinging in the wind because he was too big a coward to pull them out.

      The Iran deal gave Iran American approval of them developing nuclear weapons as long as they waited a few years. Bypassing our constitutional system was a huge abuse of power and a mistake.

  3. Doesn’t really matter as the media will never talk about Obama’s errors. They will actually attack anyone who brings them up.

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