Many — on both sides of the political aisle — faulted then-President George W. Bush and his administration for failing to anticipate the “insurgency” which followed our speedy liberation of Iraq in 2003. The same criticisms could be leveled against the incumbent and his team for failing to anticipate the difficulty of ousting Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi. On Friday, blogger Robert Stacy McCain asked if we were losing in Libya:
Scarcely three weeks after the U.S. military launched Operation Odyssey Dawn, the war in Libya is beginning to look like President Obama’s worst failure to date. While official Washington and the political press have been focused on budget negotiations and the prospect of a federal government shutdown, a foreign-policy disaster has been slowly unfolding in the deserts of the North African nation that Col. Moammar Gaddafi has ruled for more than four decades.
Read the whole thing.
Offering criticisms similar to those this other McCain delineates, George Will wonders at the administration’s “mission meander” in North Africa, “At about this point in foreign policy misadventures, the usual question is: What is Plan B? Today’s question is: What was Plan A?”
It seems almost as if the president believed he didn’t need a plan, but could lead by his presence alone.
Well, when one’s averse to using words like “victory”, you know he’s not in it to win it. He’s in it barely half-assedly just so he can look like he gives a damn about it. You know, like when he finally showed up to inspect the oil spill.
He’ll still be out on the golf course working on his putz.
This is a recurring theme with this administration. “My presence shall effect change’. There is an old saying, ‘ Never believe your press’. This president does and has for a long time. We’re paying the price for it.
I am not sure if I agree that this is Obama’s biggest failure to date, but it is a huge failure.
Meandering missions are now the norm in Afghanistan, which I learned to my chagrin on active duty. This is the new normal. Unfortunately the antiwar people on the Left who should be protesting are all so convinced that conservatives are an imminent threat that they will not break ranks and speak frankly about how much worse Libya is than anything Bush did. Many here in LA have even tried to tell me that Obama’s missiles don’t kill as many people as Bush’s did. (Sure! Tomahawks change their kill radius with new leadership!)
In military history, one of the biggest disasters for the Confederacy happened when they went “fishing” up in Pennsylvania without a real plan. (History buffs will know what I mean.)
But at the same time, the people running this website also have to take account for another huge failure on Obama’s part, which was the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I’m still a grunt in the Army right now, and most gays I know are seeing their privacy unravel while they haven’t received any protections in exchange for losing their discharge option.
The repeal was its own “mission meander,” since all of you fought to roll back an important law without demanding a clear blueprint for what would take its place. The whole rationale for that repeal was based on a Pentagon report which did NOT prove that straight people were okay with gay troops being open, but who was there to mind the details? And nobody was paying any attention to what ACTUAL GAY TROOPS said in the Pentagon Report — 85% of them said they did not want the right that was being forced on them by the repeal. The Army report on suicides earlier in 2010 had reported that over 25,000 Soldiers who would have normally been separated from the Army had been kept in service against better judgment since 2004 (the time when it became legally risky to separate gay servicemembers), which was the explanation for the increase in suicides in the Army to record levels.
So what’s changed since the December 18 vote that all of you celebrated as a great victory for your cause? No change to the chaplaincy. No increased access to counseling for gay servicemembers. Sexuality is not going to be a new Equal Opportunity code, so if you are discriminated against for your sexual behavior, too bad. The enlisted separation codes are now just as daunting and imposing as they were before, except that the only willful way to quit the service with an honorable discharge — saying “I’m gay, please discharge me” — has now been revoked. You’re stuck.
Epic. Fail. All those appeals to civil-rights history and the integration of blacks into the military seemed to overlook the fact that over 25% of casualties in the Vietnam War were black, even though they made up 12% of the population in 1970. So two decades after “breaking barriers” and getting into the Army, blacks were protesting to get recruiters out of their neighborhoods.
“Legal adults sign contracts with full awareness of what is in store for them,” is what one of the editors of GayPatriot wrote to reject the notion that repealing DADT poses a serious problem with recruitment. Someone pull the nonsense alarm! How many 18-year-olds sitting in MEPS really read the whole 12-page contract in the minutes they’re given before they sign–and where in that contract does it say life is going to suck if you discover you’re gay in the environment you are about to enter?
And yet day after day for years, the folks on this site kept blathering about how important it was to repeal DADT, repeating the same bromides about West Point graduates, Air Force captains, and nurses in the Navy. You all had no plan, no clear sense of what you were asking for, and a crippling dependence on a few servicemembers’ perspectives which did not encompass anything approaching a full scope of the problem. To add insult to injury, after the Senate vote commenters on this site wrote, “well, the ‘don’t ask’ part will still be preserved right, so people will have privacy?” Gee, Mr. Bravo Foxtrot, maybe you should have worked that out before you asked people to repeal the law.
Nobody was dying because of DADT, but people are dying because of the repeal. That’s your fault.
And those great fighters for gay equality — the Palm Center and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network — both emailed me when I requested legal or advocacy assistance to deal with harassment from heterosexual civilians based on my military status at work. They said they couldn’t help me in any way, because they only represent or deal with gay people who are fighting against discrimination by the military. Gay Soldiers who are discriminated against by straight civilians for being SOLDIERS can get no assistance from them.
Great job, you idiots.
So before you start feeling terribly smug and self-righteous about how badly Obama is botching Libya (which he is) and Afghanistan (which he and Bush botched) just remember that when YOU are presented with complicated situations, YOU let your emotions and simplistic agendas overtake the complexities of reality, and YOU proved unworthy of making life-and-death decisions about young American men and women who serve their country.
Look in thy eye before telling thy brother about his little spec in his!
Obama has no presence; his presence was all an illusion created by the MSM while the Obama 2008 Campaign exploited it well with the Messiah imagery. Now that Obama’s exposed himself as a radical Leftist Marxist & he is not leading, he’s naked for all the world to see. It’s ugly looking at a naked eunuch.
@ Robert Lopez:
#1 – agree. Iraq may be a quagmire of its own, and so may Afghanistan, but at least in Iraq there were defined goals – invade, depose Saddam, find and destroy WMD as and if present, put Saddam on trial, democratise Iraq. Or at least that’s what I believed them to be when my country (Australia) sent a squadron of fighters and some ground troops to help (and has since cravenly run away from the fight, thanks to appeasement-heavy lefties being in charge).
Here, there is none of that. If you’re going to limit your involvement to cancelling out Gaddafi’s air power, you have to be sure that the people you’re protecting have the means and the will to get the rest of the job done themselves. Otherwise we (whoever the we is) get mission creep – first we start taking out land-warfare assets, then we start integrating teams for target marking and knock out enemy fixed positions and directly involve ourselves in the land battle, and last of all we send in troops, when we should have been integrating all three from the start (even if they do not all happen simultaneously, viz the air and land phases of Desert Storm).
#2 – would you have been content to keep DADT and add “don’t investigate, don’t pursue, don’t harass, don’t inform”?
Mr Lopez gives us insight into what it must be like to be a leftist under Obama. They never considered he’d be a boob and incompetent.
Obama is the leader of the Democrats and liberals, what a shining example of the movement. hehe
I’m trying to decide which part of that is more completely nuts:
– The implied belief that Bruce supported DADT repeal. (To this day, I couldn’t say if Bruce did or not.)
– Or the implied belief that Dan’s extremely cautious, measured praise for DADT repeal (when it eventually happened) played some sort of role in DADT being repealed.
It doesn’t matter though, Robert, as much of the rest of your rant appears to be equally nuts. Thank you for your service (something I can say genuinely, from the bottom of my heart to every service person regardless of political orientation and/or sanity) and best of luck to you (ditto).