Obama believes that the Manichaeanism, and eloquently rendered bellicosity, commonly associated with Churchill were justified by Hitler. But he also thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today. The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq. Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. Kerry, like Obama himself, was horrified by the sins committed by the Syrian regime in its attempt to put down a two- year- old rebellion. In the Damascus suburb of Ghouta nine days earlier, Assad. The strong sentiment inside the Obama administration was that Assad had earned dire punishment. In Situation Room meetings that followed the attack on Ghouta, only the White House chief of staff, Denis Mc. Donough, cautioned explicitly about the perils of intervention. John Kerry argued vociferously for action. A year earlier, when the administration suspected that the Assad regime was contemplating the use of chemical weapons, Obama had declared: . That would change my calculus. That would change my equation. Late in the summer of 2. Assad. But as Assad clung to power, Obama. After several months of deliberation, he authorized the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels, but he also shared the outlook of his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had routinely asked in meetings, . Power, who during this period served on the National Security Council staff, is the author of a celebrated book excoriating a succession of U. S. The book, A Problem From Hell, published in 2. Obama to Power while he was in the U. S. Senate, though the two were not an obvious ideological match. Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as . She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States. Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. Bush and, in particular, of Bush. Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2. Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft. At the outset of the Syrian uprising, in early 2. Power argued that the rebels, drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens, deserved America. Others noted that the rebels were farmers and doctors and carpenters, comparing these revolutionaries to the men who won America. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post- Bush international arena was . Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama. In 2. 01. 4, after she left office, Clinton told me that . The president did not understand how . Ben Rhodes recalls that ? In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U. S. These included the threat posed by al. The danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges. Given Obama. Even his own advisers were surprised. I was told that Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly warned Obama against drawing a red line on chemical weapons, fearing that it would one day have to be enforced. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk. And that is a danger to our national security. Assad, it seemed, had succeeded in pushing the president to a place he never thought he would have to go. Obama generally believes that the Washington foreign- policy establishment, which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of . I’m already getting questions on what the anticipated 2016 Cost of Living Adjustment (also known as COLA Increase) will be for social security recipients. A variety of free games including shooting, puzzle, sports, racing, strategy, animal, arcade, physics, adventure, and fighting. Try two trial issues of The Atlantic with our compliments. The preservation of credibility, he says, led to Vietnam. Within the White House, Obama would argue that . At a joint press conference with Obama at the White House the previous May, David Cameron, the British prime minister, had said, . The Saudi ambassador in Washington at the time, Adel al- Jubeir, told friends, and his superiors in Riyadh, that the president was finally ready to strike. French President Fran. All week, White House officials had publicly built the case that Assad had committed a crime against humanity. The official site of the San Antonio Spurs. Includes news, scores, schedules, statistics, photos and video. Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. Torrent anonymously with torrshield encrypted vpn pay with bitcoin. Using other people’s research or ideas without giving them due credit is plagiarism. In the days after the gassing of Ghouta, Obama would later tell me, he found himself recoiling from the idea of an attack unsanctioned by international law or by Congress. The American people seemed unenthusiastic about a Syria intervention; so too did one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She told him that her country would not participate in a Syria campaign. And in a stunning development, on Thursday, August 2. British Parliament denied David Cameron its blessing for an attack. John Kerry later told me that when he heard that, . Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run- up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. But his doubts were growing. Late on Friday afternoon, Obama determined that he was simply not prepared to authorize a strike. He asked Mc. Donough, his chief of staff, to take a walk with him on the South Lawn of the White House. Obama did not choose Mc. Donough randomly: He is the Obama aide most averse to U. S. He and Mc. Donough stayed outside for an hour. Obama told him he was worried that Assad would place civilians as . He also pointed out an underlying flaw in the proposed strike: U. S. A strike would target military units that had delivered these weapons, but not the weapons themselves. Obama also shared with Mc. Donough a long- standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had . Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again. When the two men came back to the Oval Office, the president told his national- security aides that he planned to stand down. There would be no attack the next day; he wanted to refer the matter to Congress for a vote. Aides in the room were shocked. Susan Rice, now Obama. Others had difficulty fathoming how the president could reverse himself the day before a planned strike. Obama, however, was completely calm. He listed the practical worries that had preoccupied him. A second major factor was the failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his parliament. The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, told me that his government was already worried about the consequences of earlier inaction in Syria when word came of the stand- down. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the targets. It was a great surprise. If we had bombed as was planned, I think things would be different today. The king of Jordan, Abdullah II. They had never trusted Obama. John Mc. Cain and Lindsey Graham, the two leading Republican hawks in the Senate, had met with Obama in the White House earlier in the week and had been promised an attack. They were angered by the about- face. Damage was done even inside the administration. Neither Chuck Hagel, then the secretary of defense, nor John Kerry was in the Oval Office when the president informed his team of his thinking. Kerry would not learn about the change until later that evening. I figured the president had a reason to make a decision and, honestly, I understood his notion. The president asked Congress to authorize the use of force. When I spoke with Biden recently about the red- line decision, he made special note of this fact. He had his doubts at that point, but he knew that if he was going to do anything, he better damn well have the public with him, or it would be a very short ride. Do we not go in and rescue?. At the G2. 0 summit in St. Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president . But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America? When it comes to the use of military power. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign- policy think- tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign- policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro- Israel funders. Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, wrote recently that Obama. Or it could be remembered as the day he let the Middle East slip from America. At the time, I was familiar mainly with the text of a speech he had delivered four years earlier, at a Chicago antiwar rally. It was an unusual speech for an antiwar rally in that it was not antiwar; Obama, who was then an Illinois state senator, argued only against one specific and, at the time, still theoretical, war.
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