Very fun read. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/ Pertinent Quote: “The central argument is that by keeping America from immersing itself in the crises of the Middle East, the foreign-policy establishment believes that the president is precipitating our decline,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But the president himself takes the opposite view, which is that overextension in the Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons that are not in the direct American national-security interest.”
the problem is nobody here has a decent endgame strategy for the middle east right now. russia and syria have it easy. russia wants assad, their ally, in power. that simplifies things. doesn't change that russias goverment and assad are still bad. that's all the serious you'l get from me this week, anyone know a good villain song?
As a sidenote, I never understood how Obama is hawkish as frik and somehow still receives blame for not being hawkish enough I mean, how many ten thousands of bombs and drone strikes do you want to be happy?
Related: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/a...is-a-mess-due-to-europe-gulf-failure-to-help? "“When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong, there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans -- given Libya’s proximity -- being invested in the follow-up,” Obama said. The U.S. “actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected,” Obama said. “We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion -- which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict.” “And despite all that, Libya is a mess,” he said."
I think the difference is that Obama has tried to do things with diplomacy and building coalitions, and trying to intervene while keeping American troops out of it. What Americans see as "leadership" is just going in there with boots on the ground and guns blazing.
The near total silence by the anti-bomb-the-firk-out-of-innocents crowd has been a deafening roar during the last 7 years. If Cruz or Trump becomes POTUS, I bet the above folks will rise from their sarcophagi.
"He noted that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, lost his job the following year. And he said that British Prime Minister David Cameron soon stopped paying attention, becoming “distracted by a range of other things.” Of France, he said, “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to “purchase France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.” In other words, giving France extra credit in exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful trade-off—except that “from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If we’re going to do something, obviously we’ve got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight.” Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics. “The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure there that we could interact with and start training and start providing resources broke down very quickly.” Libya proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. “There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa,” he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. “That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.”"
Actually I'm pretty sure it's just obfuscationist partisan BS rather than a difference in US/EU. Obama's middle-eastern policies have been extremely closely a-lined with Bush's in many ways, with a single notable exception as far as I can tell. But if something is "going wrong" one side will spin it to make it look like their side would "do it better" when they are both doing the same damn thing. It's the same thing as those that say Obama handled the Iranian military hostage situation (which, by the way, aside from being ostensibly resposible for sending them into Iranian waters in the first place, I think he actually handled well, in fact, so far, his dealings with Iran at least seem to have been an overall improvement to the overall Iranian "situation" though it might be too soon to tell in terms of long-term consequences).
