Then how is it smart to employ bombing, when bombing alone won’t work? That’s killing people for nothing.
The subject of this thread is why Democrats in the 70s and 80s did so poorly. Because they were considered weak on national security by the public. President Obama is going down that same road and damaging the Democrats’ brand. His ratings on foreign policy are now very low.
If it’s in support of local allies, then it might not be for nothing. Further, if our goal is to put pressure on ISIS, or prevent their expansion, etc., then it might be good enough. And if it’s not doing that, then at least it’s not costing American lives.
The public still (and consistently) trusts Obama on foreign policy more than they do the Republicans. So once again your cite fails to support your assertion.
As to whether he’s “damaging the Democrats’ brand”, getting involved in a ground war would damage the brand far, far more than not doing so.
Yes, we’ve already stipulated that Obama is a Democrat.
Now what have you got in the way of facts, in *this *timeline, and reasoning that amount to anything more than that?
That poll was for Republicans in Congress, which is not Republicans in general. When the question is asked about the REpublicans vs. Democrats, Republicans have a huge lead:
http://pollingreport.com/dvsr.htm
There’s two choices when it comes to war. YOu either go, or you don’t go. You don’t go halfway. He’s reinforcing that this is the way Democrats think of war: they slowly escalate, they do it half-heartedly, they never fully commit. Then they wonder why the military gets demoralized and wonders what the hell they are fighting for. THey have no mission and if they got one they wouldn’t be given the tools to complete it.
He’d have been better off not getting involved at all. His conduct of the war is about politics.
Most of those polls are quite old. And generic parties don’t mean much when we can compare real politicians – right now, the public trusts Obama significantly more than Republican leaders on foreign policy (and most other issues).
Every war since WWII has been “halfway”. Bush’s “halfway” was the worst debacle in decades – maybe in centuries. If Obama is going “halfway”, it’s in a way that is costing very few American lives, and not nearly as much money as before.
You’re describing some fantasy America and fantasy Presidency. In the real world, and the recent past, the more we’ve been involved in a war, the weaker and poorer we become.
All of this has been much, much better under Obama than it was under Bush, and than it would be under McCain or Graham. Under a Graham presidency, we’d have thousands more dead Americans, billions more wasted dollars, and a greatly weakened America. What you’re describing is terrible strategy.
Better that (not that I agree) than a “principled” Graham/McCain-led disaster.
Did you really have to make this into another “adaher hates Obama” thread? You’re not capable of analyzing him rationally. You just sidestep every time your assertions are shown to be bunk.
Unfortunately, Presidential races do not always involve the incumbent, and they never involve Congress as his opponent. That’s why party matters. The Democratic brand is at rock bottom on terrorism. It is very likely that the Republican candidate will enjoy a big advantage on that issue.
The Gulf war wasn’t that way. The Gulf War was when we obeyed the Powell Doctrine and it worked out pretty well: Define the mission, source the mission, complete the mission. Even the second Iraq war at least partly kept to that doctrine on paper. Obama isn’t even trying. He’s reading right out of the LBJ playbook.
Since the thread is about the political problems Democrats had in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s pretty relevant. You’re just focused on getting into the weeds of the issue rather than just acknowledging that Democrats had a national security problem back then and are in the process of repeating history.
I doubt that, but we’ll see. I think it’s very, very easy to make the claim that the Democrats (and Obama) have a much better recent record on terrorism than Republicans.
Right, and it didn’t do much. It gave Kuwait back to Kuwaitis, and that was it.
Meaningless bullshit. The second Iraq war was a historic, disastrous blunder.
More meaningless bullshit. Obama is not spending hundreds of billions, and he’s not getting thousands of Americans killed.
The Democrats definitely were perceived as weak on national security back then. They aren’t now, and even if they were, Obama’s policies give the Democrats the best chance of being seen as “strong” on national security and foreign policy. A ground war would result in the Democrats being seen (rightfully) as very weak. A ground war in the region would make the country and whatever party leads it weaker. Thankfully, for both America and the Democratic party, Obama isn’t getting us involved in a ground war.
Your suggested strategy would greatly weaken America, and greatly weaken the Democratic party’s image on national security and foreign policy.
And you’re still not capable of analyzing Obama rationally. You just look at everything in the worst possible way it can reflect on him.
I’ve often agreed with you that Democrats can make an argument that they are doing better than their public perception. And given how disastrous the Bush administration was, I think it would be easy to argue that Obama has been better, and Clinton probably will be even better than that. But the public perception that Democrats are weaker on national security is part of the reality we live in.
That was the mission though. Liberate Kuwait. That’s it. It’s the mission the UN wanted, it’s the mission we resourced. And we did it perfectly. That was the beauty of it. We gave our forces a mission that they knew they could accomplish and we didn’t micromanage what they would get or limit the tactics they could use to make it happen. We let the military handle the details once we’d decided on the mission. That’s how you do it. Schwarzkopf designed the strategy, not Bush or Cheney or even Powell.
That’s because they had the wrong assumptions about what would be needed. Plus Rummy had politicized the military. He got generals who told him what he wanted to hear and canned generals who didn’t. So more lessons learned.
He has, however, failed to employ the resources necessary to fulfill the mission. The assumed mission, anyway.
Maybe. I’m not Presidential material. But I do have faith in the judgment of the military to know what we need to carry out the Commander-in-Chief’s orders. The President has every right to disregard military advice. But when he does, he owns the failure if it occurs. If ISIS is controlling more territory in 2016, that’s going to contribute to perceptions that Democrats are weak.
No it’s not, unless you cherry pick polls. Obama is more trusted than republicans in congress. That’s just as much of the “reality we live in”.
A much different situation then today, and not comparable.
To do so, if the mission is to utterly destroy ISIS, would greatly weaken America.
Maybe so. Still doesn’t mean boots on the ground (or any of your other shitty ideas) would help matters.
What was he basing his estimates on? His history as the manager of a baseball team?
Professional soldiers were telling the President he needed to use more troops back when the invasion was being planned. They were right but Bush didn’t listen to them. Ignoring what his experts were telling him was another example of his terrible lack of judgement.
Some soldiers told him he needed more troops. So Rummy just promoted the ones who were telling him what he wanted to hear: that the troops they had were enough.
Another factor was that the administration didn’t intend to do nationbuilding. They planned to go in, hand things quickly over to a government Loya Jirga-style, and get out. Everyone had agreed on that. But when Bush hired Paul Bremer, Bremer had different plans and Bush let Bremer change everything, even though that upset literally everything. the military, even the ones who had told Bush he could do the job with less than 200,000 troops, was furious.