Absolutely correct. I hope I did not leave the impression that I was
apologizing for Obama. To my way of thinking, Obama is no different
than me or you. We are each of us responsible for our actions. Obama
has chosen to "go along" with the Hawks in the American Empire. He
has the power to walk away or to block certain actions. So my only
conclusion is that he has bought into the corruption of power that
passes for American Justice.
But I disagree that Obama holds the most powerful office in the world.
That honor goes to whatever General or group of Generals, cloistered
in an office somewhere deep within the Pentagon.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/15/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sorry, Obama is not just a victim of circumstance, a poor President at the
mercy of a mean and corrupt congress, a man of peace forced into war. Obama
holds the most powerful office in the world and he has made choices, all
kinds of choices and these choices that he has made, and is making on a
daily basis, are being documented in books written by courageous
journalists
who, unlike many at the NYT, do not feel that it is their job to provide
excuses for our government or to promote its positions. Aside from James
Risen, who bravely wrote the truth and was hounded because of it, all of
the
books and articles about Obama that NYT reporters have written since then,
have described and explained what Obama has done, but have never given the
background or the facts that might indicate that what he has done and is
doing, is illegal or unethical. He was given the Peace prize because he
wasn't W. Bush and because he spoke more intelligently than Bush did.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2016 10:42 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Legacy of Obama Administraton
Mister Nobel ought to be spinning in his grave. While I hold our Pentagon
Rulers responsible for the 7 plus years of war under Obama, and more than 6
years under George Bush II, it seems to me that when a leader has honestly
attempted to end World-Wide conflict and failed, that he would announce
that
he was stepping down and turning the job over to others, like the US
Senate.
I mention the Senate since they set out to block everything that had
Obama's
fingerprints.
And so, in November we will pick a new sacrificial president to send into
the iron jaws of our glorious military machine. And after another 4 or 8
years we can all wring our hands and moan that there seems to be nothing
but
hatred for our Peace Loving Nation, around the world.
Yup, Mister Nobel is most certainly spinning. Which makes me wonder about
those of us who are cremated. We can't spin in our graves.
Maybe that explains those little dust devils spinning along the highways.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/15/16, Richard Driscoll <llocsirdsr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
All:priorities."
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+KVBjmEgFdYACPLKh239P3p
g4Nf+G/ZuektKgE1b92jrxEaBV7XWLkahzBBlOyP+3KgsIq9XNZ3/uWVnUxSS3TIbtzieu
vmSopMEBfaVxRIJa27pmDAgvfZ3Qi4FsjiukryoRZkZBv8La+pPV4weZj8IbNeLVVT3FmK
Xtdc5Zse6Ks8EvfRvTSKmRlcqaJDmNgb0xh8BBDJ1i9jzCw/ThUUb&campaign_id=129&
instance_id=76253&segment_id=89506&user_id=1ef030aa7a483e750f4addce9f6
f355b®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_lan
dler/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_o
bama/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-le
cture.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
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-an
nounces-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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