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What successful advice did the military give Obama?
I seem to recall something called the surge. Successful by all accounts even though resisted by Obama at its conception.
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And since when does the military set policy in the Middle East?
Since we began supporting them with financial aide and having to keep that aid from being used to attack us.
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Give me a case of the military ever telling a sitting president to "pull out
all the troops" anywhere...Even when the war was going disastrously and the
mission was undefined and nebulous..
You are the one claiming that the military is the one who wanted to withdraw the troops. In spite of their recommendation to maintain 10 - 30 thousand ground troops be left behind. At the time, the war was not going badly at all. That occurred when his nibs unilaterally decided to pull out the troops. Welcome in ISIS and renewed strife. As for defining the goals of the war, that also falls on the commander in chief, in this case Obama the bumbler.
You are the one claiming that the military is the one who wanted to withdraw the troops. In spite of their recommendation to maintain 10 - 30 thousand ground troops be left behind. At the time, the war was not going badly at all. That occurred when his nibs unilaterally decided to pull out the troops. Welcome in ISIS and renewed strife. As for defining the goals of the war, that also falls on the commander in chief, in this case Obama the bumbler.
Even during the "quietest" part of the war, there were hundreds of Iraqi civilians getting killed in acts of "militant violence." It was never a stable situations. The outward appearance of "stability" came mainly from two factors - a decline in the number of enormous car-bombs going off near TV cameras in Baghdad, and a decline in attacks on US soldiers, which reduced the death toll in their ranks.
As we later learned, much of that was due to a combination of militias (both Sunni and Shia) being paid not to carry out attacks and a reduction in patrol activities outside of bases.
It's not clear how a continued US troop presence in the 30,000 range could have made much difference once Iraq inevitably slipped back into sectarian war. If anything, it would have been seen as insufficient, and would have led for calls for yet more soldiers to be sent to bolster those numbers.
Just look over to Afghanistan, where the current presence of tens of thousands of US and NATO soldiers has done little to keep the Taliban from taking over large chunks of that country's south, or from staging attacks in the north itself. Iraq was doomed from the time of Saddam's ouster, which is what many anti-war writers had warned about in the first place before being either ignored by mainstream US media and politicians, or told rudely to shut up.
We will continue to spend astronomical amounts on our military--more than the next 10 big-spending nations put together--even though economic might now rules the world, and military might returns virtually nothing to the nation that invests in it. Every educated American should recognize these words and bring them to the attention of the less intellectually gifted:
"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry...
"We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations...The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government....we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military-Industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist...
Later in this same, consummately important speech: "As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow."
Did anyone truly believe the liar in chief would pass up an opportunity to flip flop and send more troops?
This is what he does, say one thing and do another assuming that no one will notice.
Particularly odd (not really, has rather come par for the course) that it is not given much more attention on the so called "news".
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