Chronicles of Obama's Foreign Policy Failure - ISIS/ISIL

[maxparrish]

Six months ago Obama's lassitude and lethargy on foreign policy reached a new high. ISIS, "the JVs", caught Obama flat-footed and unprepared, in spite of six months to year of warning. Like the Ukraine crisis, (as Panetta and Hillary have politely confirmed) Obama's cultivated obliviousness is part of his interest in doing as little as possible, and risking little. His resolve to do nothing began to yield after being harassed by public outrage and the press to do something to check an ongoing genocide of Christian sects. After a few "humanitarian" missions and a few air strikes his strategy remained a mystery culminating with his Aug 28th announcement: “We don’t have a strategy yet.”

Interestingly, Obama's strategy is neither a victory nor an exit strategy - it is a "just enough" strategy to contain ISIS, hoping the hapless Iraqi's and out-gunned "moderate Syrians (whoever they are)" can turn it around. Yet, the administration has yet to negotiate a final set of training sites, and are yet to vet any potential recruits.

As Rubin of the Washington Post recently observed:

If there is one thing the right and left, Democrats and Republicans, politicians and experts could all agree on, it was that President Obama’s take on the world is shockingly delusional. The most common question seems to be: Could he believe what he was saying?

On MSNBC Andrea Mitchell said flat-out that the president has a “credibility problem”: “It’s really hard to see what the progress has been against ISIS in Syria for sure, and in Iraq. He will say there is now a government in Iraq and that there is a more secular government in Iraq, a more inclusive government in Iraq. But to claim progress against ISIS and against terrorism, especially on a day when Yemen is fraught with the possibility of collapse and we’ve got a new hostage video from ISIS with Japanese hostages, is really hard to fathom.” Over on NBC, foreign reporter Richard Engel declared that the president’s insistence that we are winning against the Islamic State was fictional. “It sounded like the president was outlining a world that he wishes we were all living in but is very different from the world that you just described,” he said. Obama’s assertion that we have stopped the Islamic State’s advances “just isn’t the case . . . There was a general tone . . . of suspended disbelief when he was talking about foreign policy.” ...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said it was “delusional” to claim success on the same day (that) Yemen — the country Obama previously claimed as an example of the rightness of his foreign policy — fell to Iranian-backed rebels.

...Bloomberg’s foreign policy investigative reporter, Josh Rogin, “translated” the president’s absurd statements. As for his boast his foreign policy is “smarter,” Rogin wisecracked that this really meant: “I campaigned on the idea that we needed to restore America’s image in the world and I’m going to claim that this has happened and is yielding benefits, without specifying what exactly those benefits are....

But Rogin (“I’m prepared to call anybody who is for sanctions a warmonger, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat. You’ll probably do it anyway, but I’ll try to make it as painful as possible.”) and others reserved their harshest criticism for the president’s misleading and nonsensical comments about Iran....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...t-last-obama-is-delusional-on-foreign-policy/

In the meantime, it was just announced that UAE has pulled out of the coalition.

So much for leading from behind.

 

[Ford]

ISIS/ISIL caught a lot of people "flat footed." The idea that a few more robust speeches by the Obama administration could have halted their rapid advance is sheer fantasy.

Even more delusional is the implication that Obama's foreign policy is somehow responsible for the rise of the so-called Islamic State, and that a policy akin to what the neo cons and hawks advocate would have kept that genie in the bottle.

Dragging the US military back into an occupation of Iraq, inserting our soldiers into the civil war raging in Syria, or thinking we can use firepower to set things aright in the Middle East is not exactly a brilliant foreign policy either.


A lot of this stuff is sectarian conflicts, and in case you haven't noticed, the United States is neither Sunni nor Shia.

 

[laughing dog]

Seems Islamist terrorists catch lots of people flat-footed. I'm surprised the massive Obama butthurt brigade hasn't pinned the 9-11 failure on him.

And any OP which quotes John McCain calling anyone else "delusional" is laughable.

 

[untermensche]

Blowing up Iraq didn't have the effect the people who told us it was necessary promised.

And even Humpty Dumpty Obama couldn't put it back together again.

 

[maxparrish]

ISIS/ISIL caught a lot of people "flat footed." The idea that a few more robust speeches by the Obama administration could have halted their rapid advance is sheer fantasy.

Even more delusional is the implication that Obama's foreign policy is somehow responsible for the rise of the so-called Islamic State, and that a policy akin to what the neo cons and hawks advocate would have kept that genie in the bottle.

"Flat feet" were not a problem with many of Obama's own policy and intelligence advisors, none of whom flippantly assessed the ISIS-Al Qeuda to be nothing more than "JVers". For example, in Congressional hearings in January and February of 2014, Obama's recently departed director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael Flynn, warned that ISIS would "probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.”

Except for the willfully oblivious in the white house it was not a difficult prediction for most to make; ISIS had already taken the Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Fallujah. http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Flynn_02-11-14.pdf

And, James Jeffery, who served as US ambassador to Iraq under Obama told Frontline's documentary on ISIS that :“The administration not only was warned by everybody back in January, it actually announced that it was going to intensify support against ISIS with the Iraqi armed forces. And it did almost nothing,”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF1BGMHKssY

The roots of Obama's failure was in his failure to heed warnings about ISIS, failure to leave at least 10,000 US troops Iraq and in his ignoring the urgings of Leon Panetta, Robert Ford (ambassador to Syria) and Hillary Clinton to arm the "moderates" in Syria.

Other than that, he has done a bangup job.

 

[arkirk]

Blowing up Iraq didn't have the effect the people who told us it was necessary promised.

And even Humpty Dumpty Obama couldn't put it back together again.

While I don't support much of Obama's foreign policies (and shipping drones and fly by wire kinetic weapons all over the world), I think the ultimate mistake a person could make is to listen to ANYTHING Senators McCain or Mitch McMouth says. These men openly admit their purpose is to destroy the Obama presidency. I feel they would not mind destroying our nation in this endeavor. They seem to be men without conscience.

I agree Obama may not be anywhere near solving the problem of putting these many holdover Humpty Dumpties from past administrations back together again. They will probably stay broken for a very long time under Obama and many others who might seek that office, but to take McCain or McConnel's advice would be to just break some more Humpty Dumpties...possibly the U.S. being one of them.

 

[Valjean]

Given Obama's lassitude and lethargy, what would the proper approach to foreign policy have been?

 

[TV and credit cards]

Given Obama's lassitude and lethargy, what would the proper approach to foreign policy have been?

The key question. I'd like to know this also, from the gang that is always telling me how fucked up Obama is.
I've always perceived his foreign policy as pushing others to have some skin in the game, to learn to take care of what is going on in your own backyard. To stop relying on the US to solve the world's problems just to admonish us after the fact.
And to all those who are always beating the war drum and calling for boots on the ground, I've still got a pair in the closet. Your welcome to them.

 

[Valjean]

Those beating the war drum, it seems to me, are largely responsible for the present brouhaha. Our military adventurism has a history of blowback and unintended consequences - allies turning against us, power vacuums filled by thugs and fundamentalists, &c.

 

[Togo]

The idea of these threads is that if we keep on saying bad things about Obama, people will grow to mistrust him?

Even if none of those things are true in any useful sense?

I guess if you don't have any policies of your own, it's the best you can do...

 

[KeepTalking]

Blah blah blah, Obama sucks, blah blah blah.*

As Rubin of the Washington Post recently observed:

If there is one thing the right and left, Democrats and Republicans, politicians and experts could all agree on, it was that President Obama’s take on the world is shockingly delusional.

What bullshit. Only the right wing echo chamber believes this. I am an independent leftist liberal and progressive, and the only delusion I can see here is coming from the WaPo, and the OP.



*paraphrasing

 

[Frikki]

Six months ago Obama's lassitude and lethargy on foreign policy reached a new high. ISIS, "the JVs", caught Obama flat-footed and unprepared, in spite of six months to year of warning. Like the Ukraine crisis, (as Panetta and Hillary have politely confirmed) Obama's cultivated obliviousness is part of his interest in doing as little as possible, and risking little. His resolve to do nothing began to yield after being harassed by public outrage and the press to do something to check an ongoing genocide of Christian sects. After a few "humanitarian" missions and a few air strikes his strategy remained a mystery culminating with his Aug 28th announcement: “We don’t have a strategy yet.”

Interestingly, Obama's strategy is neither a victory nor an exit strategy - it is a "just enough" strategy to contain ISIS, hoping the hapless Iraqi's and out-gunned "moderate Syrians (whoever they are)" can turn it around. Yet, the administration has yet to negotiate a final set of training sites, and are yet to vet any potential recruits.

As Rubin of the Washington Post recently observed:

If there is one thing the right and left, Democrats and Republicans, politicians and experts could all agree on, it was that President Obama’s take on the world is shockingly delusional. The most common question seems to be: Could he believe what he was saying?

On MSNBC Andrea Mitchell said flat-out that the president has a “credibility problem”: “It’s really hard to see what the progress has been against ISIS in Syria for sure, and in Iraq. He will say there is now a government in Iraq and that there is a more secular government in Iraq, a more inclusive government in Iraq. But to claim progress against ISIS and against terrorism, especially on a day when Yemen is fraught with the possibility of collapse and we’ve got a new hostage video from ISIS with Japanese hostages, is really hard to fathom.” Over on NBC, foreign reporter Richard Engel declared that the president’s insistence that we are winning against the Islamic State was fictional. “It sounded like the president was outlining a world that he wishes we were all living in but is very different from the world that you just described,” he said. Obama’s assertion that we have stopped the Islamic State’s advances “just isn’t the case . . . There was a general tone . . . of suspended disbelief when he was talking about foreign policy.” ...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said it was “delusional” to claim success on the same day (that) Yemen — the country Obama previously claimed as an example of the rightness of his foreign policy — fell to Iranian-backed rebels.

...Bloomberg’s foreign policy investigative reporter, Josh Rogin, “translated” the president’s absurd statements. As for his boast his foreign policy is “smarter,” Rogin wisecracked that this really meant: “I campaigned on the idea that we needed to restore America’s image in the world and I’m going to claim that this has happened and is yielding benefits, without specifying what exactly those benefits are....

But Rogin (“I’m prepared to call anybody who is for sanctions a warmonger, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat. You’ll probably do it anyway, but I’ll try to make it as painful as possible.”) and others reserved their harshest criticism for the president’s misleading and nonsensical comments about Iran....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...t-last-obama-is-delusional-on-foreign-policy/

In the meantime, it was just announced that UAE has pulled out of the coalition.

So much for leading from behind.

So Max when are you signing up to fight the next middle eastern war?

 

[KeepTalking]

Six months ago Obama's lassitude and lethargy on foreign policy reached a new high. ISIS, "the JVs", caught Obama flat-footed and unprepared, in spite of six months to year of warning. Like the Ukraine crisis, (as Panetta and Hillary have politely confirmed) Obama's cultivated obliviousness is part of his interest in doing as little as possible, and risking little. His resolve to do nothing began to yield after being harassed by public outrage and the press to do something to check an ongoing genocide of Christian sects. After a few "humanitarian" missions and a few air strikes his strategy remained a mystery culminating with his Aug 28th announcement: “We don’t have a strategy yet.”

Interestingly, Obama's strategy is neither a victory nor an exit strategy - it is a "just enough" strategy to contain ISIS, hoping the hapless Iraqi's and out-gunned "moderate Syrians (whoever they are)" can turn it around. Yet, the administration has yet to negotiate a final set of training sites, and are yet to vet any potential recruits.

As Rubin of the Washington Post recently observed:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...t-last-obama-is-delusional-on-foreign-policy/

In the meantime, it was just announced that UAE has pulled out of the coalition.

So much for leading from behind.

So Max when are you signing up to fight the next middle eastern war?

The next one? Given max's rhetoric, I would think he is strapping on his combat boots and booking a flight to Syria as we speak.

Boots on the ground, Maxie.

Boots on the ground!!!

 

[Ford]

The roots of Obama's failure was in his failure to heed warnings about ISIS, failure to leave at least 10,000 US troops Iraq and in his ignoring the urgings of Leon Panetta, Robert Ford (ambassador to Syria) and Hillary Clinton to arm the "moderates" in Syria.

It wasn't a "failure" not to leave troops in Iraq. ISIS came into existence in no small part as a result of our bone-headed invasion and complete clusterfuck of an occupation in that country. The idiotic idea that just a few more targets "boots on the ground" will solve all our problems in the Middle East has been proven decisively wrong. As for arming the Syrian "moderates" we tried that before, too. Afghanistan is the most glaring example of why that's a terrible idea, but arming "freedom fighters" in the interest of promoting our hegemony has come back to bite us in the ass repeatedly.


It took us almost a decade to extract ourselves from the blunder that was the Iraq War. In order to "defeat" ISIS we'd have to invade Iraq all over again, and probably Syria as well. Another trillion dollars, another few tens of thousands of casualties, and another decade trying to "fix" that which we have repeatedly broken.


Go sell your interventionist bullshit somewhere else.

 

[ksen]

I thought the people we originally helped arm during the Syrian rebellion turned into ISIS?

And you want to do it again?

Good plan.

 

[ZiprHead]

Here is a link for Max. A credit card and a plane ticket is all he needs. Once there he can fight IS all day long.

military boots

 

[ZiprHead]

http://clashdaily.com/2014/09/ted-nugent-exterminate-voodoo-zombies-isis/#

 

[TSwizzle]

Interestingly, Obama's strategy is neither a victory nor an exit strategy - it is a "just enough" strategy to contain ISIS, hoping the hapless Iraqi's and out-gunned "moderate Syrians (whoever they are)" can turn it around. Yet, the administration has yet to negotiate a final set of training sites, and are yet to vet any potential recruits.

I'm not sure what "victory" means or would look like. But Obama's strategy is fine. Just contain them, let them continue to duke it out between them for another 1,500 years if necessary.

 

[lpetrich]

I am not impressed by the OP. That's because of what the right wing said about the Libyan civil war. First US military force should be used there, then it shouldn't. That's also because of how the right wing reacted to Bill Clinton's wars. They turned into lily-livered pacifists, even claiming that Clinton had started them as "Wag the Dog" distractions from his problems. What a turnaround from only objecting to a US war when it didn't go far enough for them, and of dismissing opposition to wars as everything from naive idealism to outright treason.

That aside, I don't think that many Americans have much stomach for several hundred thousand US troops being sent to Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. Certainly not after the flop that was the Iraq War.

 

[maxparrish]

The roots of Obama's failure was in his failure to heed warnings about ISIS, failure to leave at least 10,000 US troops Iraq and in his ignoring the urgings of Leon Panetta, Robert Ford (ambassador to Syria) and Hillary Clinton to arm the "moderates" in Syria.

It wasn't a "failure" not to leave troops in Iraq. ISIS came into existence in no small part as a result of our bone-headed invasion and complete clusterfuck of an occupation in that country. The idiotic idea that just a few more targets "boots on the ground" will solve all our problems in the Middle East has been proven decisively wrong. As for arming the Syrian "moderates" we tried that before, too. Afghanistan is the most glaring example of why that's a terrible idea, but arming "freedom fighters" in the interest of promoting our hegemony has come back to bite us in the ass repeatedly.

A poppycock strawman. Regardless of how the ISI (ISIS) ACTUALLY started (in 1999 in Jordan) prior to Obama it is irrelevant to an assessment of the administration's handling - as such, Obama's complete failure should be self-evident. In late 2006 the insurgent group in Iraq was well-funded by extortion, ransoms, and black market oil sales - raising between 70 and 200 million a year. Bush's use of a surge, a new strategy, and the backing of Sahwa militias (especially in Anbar) proved very effective. By 2008 the proliferation of the ISI enemies drove most of the ISI out of Iraq and back to Syria (most ISI fighters were Syrian in origin, originally facilitated into Iraq by Assad's intelligence agencies).

And even though ISI remnants remained under intense pressure till 2011, Obama's total withdrawal from 2009 to 2010 dramatically reduced the Sahwa military capabilities, and boosted ISI recruitment. ISI HQ'd in Mosul to exploit Arab-Kurdish tensions, made leadership changes, and in 2011 restarted their war of terrorism. In 2011 they also began operations in Syria, eventually killing the leader of the Free Syrian Army. Finally, starting in July of 2013 they began their second operational offensive to retake Iraq.

Had boots been left on the ground in Iraq, you wouldn't need to be whining defeatist bullocks excuses like 'it can't solve their problems' - after all, there wouldn't be a resurgent ISI problem in Iraq needing solved. It would have kept ISI on the run and prevented revitalization of the ISI in Iraq. The US would have continued to provide the Sahwa military with the pay, supplies, and backing they lacked after Obama recklessly fled the theater.

Yes there is a fews lessons from Afghanistan - a) Helping the Northern Alliance with arms and military action drove the Taliban from power and b) Leaving Afghanistan will facilitate their return to Taliban's power and c) if you want to keep a threat on the defensive you have to fight, not cut and run.

Go sell your interventionist bullshit somewhere else.

Except, of course, Obama is already intervening - albeit very poorly.