NP - It's Not About Syria

[Rev'd Seventy-Six]

The O doctrine is a faint, fading hope, given I'm still waiting for
the man to get around to actually emancipating the Gitmoids...

On 9/7/13, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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