NP - It's Not About Syria

[David Morris]

He could try the Obama Doctrine.

On Saturday, September 7, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:

>
> Well, I can't speak to or for the president either, so my advice here is
> just like the author's, of little use but to let me say something about the
> hot topic Syria. The Carter Doctrine is cited but the Clinton one is not.
> And, as any idiot knows, Obama, whose Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton,
> only recently passed the baton to Kerry, is a Clinton man. His
> administration is, ironically, more Clintonized now, than is was when
> Hilary had Kerry's job. If anyone hasn't figured it out, Clinton inherited
> a Bush mess and managed it well. Obama inherited a Bush mess, much bigger,
> and much dirtier, from the banking crisis to he wars and he WMD fiasco to
> the stupid economy. And Obama has been using the Clinton play book, so
> yesterday when he spoke after the G-20, it was Clinton he claimed to be
> following, not Bush, not Carter. But Obama is failing. If we grant that
> Clinton was successful, Obama has failed before the military part. This is
> the question: how can Obama do what Bill did? The answer: he ca not. Why?
> Because history does not repeat itself. Times have changed, and this
> problem in Syria can't be solved with the Clinton play book. And, Obama is
> no Bill Clinton. Though both lacked international credentials, forget about
> he Nobel albatross, Though both were weak inside the beltway, stron out on
> the campaign, Obama lacks the slickness, the political savvy, the
> cleverness of Bill. He is an intellectual of a different stripe and this
> has, sadly, hurt him. He is, like Carter in this sense, too honest and too
> determined to be a great humanitarian. To everything there is a time. Now
> is not he time for such a president. This makes him almost tragic. For we
> see in his incremental discovery of his weakness, in his Nobel, and
> noble  weakness, what he can't and won't discover until all the world knows
> it is too late for him to recover and be great, but in his tragic part.
>
>
> On Saturday, September 7, 2013, David Morris wrote:
>
>> http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/attack-donohue-bacevich.html
>>
>> ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I mean, if I could have five minutes of the
>> president’s time, I’d say, “Mr. President, the issue really is not Syria. I
>> mean, you’re being told that it’s Syria. You’re being told you have to do
>> something about Syria, that you have to make a decision about Syria. That
>> somehow your credibility is on the line.”
>>
>> But I’d say, “Mr. President, that’s not true. The issue really here is
>> whether or not an effort over the course of several decades, dating back to
>> the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, an effort that extends
>> over several decades to employ American power, military power, overt,
>> covert military power exercise through proxies, an effort to use military
>> power to somehow stabilize or fix or liberate or transform the greater
>> Middle East hasn’t worked.
>>
>> “And if you think back to 1980, and just sort of tick off the number of
>> military enterprises that we have been engaged in that part of the world,
>> large and small, you know, Beirut, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and
>> on and on, and ask yourself, ‘What have we got done? What have we achieved?
>> Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more Democratic? Are we
>> enhancing America’s standing in the eyes of the people of the Islamic
>> world?’
>>
>> “The answers are, ‘No, no, and no.’ So why, Mr. President, do you think
>> that initiating yet another war, ’cause if we bomb Syria, it’s a war, why
>> do you think that initiating yet another war in this protracted enterprise
>> is going to produce a different outcome? Wouldn’t it be perhaps wise to ask
>> ourselves if this militarized approach to the region maybe is a fool’s
>> errand.
>>
>
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