All:
I found the following NYT article to be of interest to me. I wonder
what caused them to use this particular statistic.
http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=4z5Q7LhI+KVBjmEgFdYACPLKh239P3pg4Nf+G/ZuektKgE1b92jrxEaBV7XWLkahzBBlOyP+3KgsIq9XNZ3/uWVnUxSS3TIbtzieuvmSopMEBfaVxRIJa27pmDAgvfZ3Qi4FsjiukryoRZkZBv8La+pPV4weZj8IbNeLVVT3FmKXtdc5Zse6Ks8EvfRvTSKmRlcqaJDmNgb0xh8BBDJ1i9jzCw/ThUUb&campaign_id=129&instance_id=76253&segment_id=89506&user_id=1ef030aa7a483e750f4addce9f6f355b®i_id=60088859
For Obama, an Unexpected Legacy of Two Full Terms at War
By MARK LANDLER
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/mark_landler/index.html>MAY
14, 2016
President Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 2009. Since
then, he has tried to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar
candidate. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Obama
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
came into office seven years ago pledging to end the wars of his
predecessor, George W. Bush. On May 6, with eight months left before he
vacates the White House, Mr. Obama passed a somber, little-noticed
milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other
American president.
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria
until the end of Mr. Obama’s term — a near-certainty given the
president’s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special
Operations forces to Syria — he will leave behind an improbable legacy
as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms
with the nation at war.
Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in
the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar
candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero
Abraham Lincoln.
Granted, Mr. Obama is leaving far fewer soldiers in harm’s way — at
least 4,087 in Iraq and 9,800 in Afghanistan — than the 200,000 troops
he inherited from Mr. Bush in the two countries. But Mr. Obama has also
approved strikes against terrorist groups in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia
and Yemen, for a total of seven countries where his administration has
taken military action.
“No president wants to be a war president,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a
military historian at Johns Hopkins University who backed the war in
Iraq and whose son served there twice. “Obama thinks of war as an
instrument he has to use very reluctantly. But we’re waging these long,
rather strange wars. We’re killing lots of people. We’re taking casualties.”
Mr. Obama has wrestled with this immutable reality from his first year
in the White House, when he went for a walk among the tombstones at
Arlington National Cemetery before giving the order to send 30,000
additional troops into Afghanistan.
His closest advisers say he has relied so heavily on limited covert
operations and drone strikes because he is mindful of the dangers of
escalation and has long been skeptical that American military
interventions work.
Publicly, Mr. Obama acknowledged early on the contradiction between his
campaign message and the realities of governing. When he accepted the
Nobel
<https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/obama-lecture.html>
in December 2009, he declared that humanity needed to reconcile “two
seemingly irreconcilable truths — that war is sometimes necessary, and
war at some level is an expression of human folly.”
The president has tried to reconcile these truths by approaching his
wars in narrow terms, as a chronic but manageable security challenge
rather than as an all-consuming national campaign, in the tradition of
World War II or, to a lesser degree, Vietnam. The longevity of his war
record, military historians say, also reflects the changing definition
of war.
“It’s the difference between being a war president and a president at
war,” said Derek Chollet, who served in the State Department and the
White House during Mr. Obama’s first term and as the assistant secretary
of defense for international security affairs from 2012 to 2015.
“Being a war president means that all elements of American power and
foreign policy are subservient to fighting the war,” Mr. Chollet said.
“What Obama has tried to do, which is why he’s careful about ratcheting
up the number of forces, is not to have it overwhelm other priorities.”
But Mr. Obama has found those conflicts maddeningly hard to end. On Oct.
21, 2011, he announced
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/president-obama-announces-end-of-war-in-iraq.html>
that the last combat soldier would leave Iraq by the end of that year,
drawing that eight-year war to a close. “Our troops will definitely be
home for the holidays,” Mr. Obama said at the White House.
Less than three years later, he told a national television audience that
he would send 475 military advisers back to Iraq to help in the battle
against the Islamic State, the brutal terrorist group that swept into
the security vacuum left by the absent Americans. By last month, more
than 5,000 American troops were in Iraq.
A furious firefight this month between Islamic State fighters and Navy
SEALs in northern Iraq, in which Special Warfare Operator First Class
Charles Keating IV became the third American to die
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/world/middleeast/us-service-member-killed-iraq-isis.html>
since the campaign against the Islamic State began, harked back to the
bloodiest days of the Iraq war. It also made the administration’s
argument that the Americans were only advising and assisting Iraqi
forces seem ever less plausible.
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