Monday, May 5, 2014

The fail-safe Obama Doctrine

When you command a military that has the power to blow up the planet several times over, you work a fail-safe system into each plan you prepare for current use and future uses. You also update the systems on a regular basis to keep up with the times. This done, you wrap the whole thing into a strategy which is itself protected by a fail-safe system that will trigger automatically when set to operate according to program, or be overridden manually if necessary.

In fact, this is the best that anyone can get, and it is what America has got from President Barack Obama who is Commander-in-Chief of the American military. Obama does not run around revealing the strategy to everyone that asks; he works with his plans everyday, and the result is there for all to see. But not everyone likes what they see for one reason or another, and this is why a confrontation ensues once in a while such as the one described in the article that was written by Doyle McManus under the title: “What Americans really want in a foreign policy” and published on May 4, 2014 in the Los Angeles Times.

McManus describes a scene in which a Fox News reporter asked a dumb question and received a presidential kick in his behind. The question was this: Are critics wrong to say that America's global position is marked by “weakness”? Well, it was never clear which critics the reporter had in mind. In addition, the word “weakness” was never defined. And so, having no clarity on these two points, the President gave a general response that would cover the presentations given by the dozens of psychopaths who get invited to the Fox network each day. When there, they spew lunatic fantasies about the sick desires they hold in their hearts and minds to see the full fury of Armageddon realized at long last.

Despite the transparent nature of the Fox satanic little games, McManus called the President's response testy. But given what prompted it, anyone that is blessed with a grain of sanity should be able to understand why a Commander-in-Chief holding the lives of 7 billion people in his hand would responded as follows: “Most of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures. Proponents of what I consider to be a disastrous decision to go into Iraq haven't really learned the lesson of the last decade, and they keep on just playing the same old note over and over again.” Testy be it if that's what it will take to make the point clear.

This is where McManus crosses from laying the groundwork for his presentation to opining on the events. He begins this segment with the following: “there are two problems with what the president said.” McManus explains that the critics did not demand that America go to war in Syria or Ukraine; they only wanted to see American weapons sent there, he says. And to this, there can only be one response:

No,no,no ... No, Doyle McManus, they wanted to see Syria bombed and that's an act of war. They also wanted to see America train the Ukrainian army and supply it with weapons. That's a territory closer to Russia than Vietnam ever was. And you know something, Doyle? That's the first time, as far as I know, that the expression “mission creep” was coined. The Americans went there as advisers, and ended up sending home nearly 60,000 body-bags as well as hundreds of thousands of broken bodies and broken minds. It was mission creep like the one that the critics are now asking for.

Moreover, these so-called critics are not really critics but advocates who push an agenda that is going contrary to the will of the American people. To achieve their goal, they keep inventing historical events that never happened so as to create fictitious precedents. And the supposed historical events they create are to the effect that past presidents have discharged their presidential duty by motivating the public, and by leading a reluctant nation to war. Those presidents did it, goes the fake story, by using the bully pulpit to transform the mood of the public from one of apprehension about the war to one of enthusiasm for it. And the advocates who posed as legitimate critics looked forward to seeing Obama follow a similar pattern.

This is why the Fox reporter kept stressing something that McManus has cited as being the second problem with Obama's response. Here is how our author put it: “The second problem is that the president ducked the critics' chief complaint: that his aversion to all forms of military intervention has emboldened malefactors like Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad.”

It is clear that the attempt here is to accuse the President of something he is not, then use the effect to shame him. The image they sought to create was that of someone who failed to act like the strong leader an American president ought to be ... which is why bad guys are proliferating throughout the world, they contend. In their eyes, Putin, Assad and all those like them are here because Obama is here. And those critics who are, in truth, but one and the same with the so-called Fox journalists want the world and Obama to see the situation the way they see it. Fat chance, and they know it.

It seems that by the time McManus had reached this point, he lost confidence in what he was writing. Lacking energy, he sought to buttress his argument by quoting Robert Kagan who wrote an article about polls that – in his view – contained a paradox. Well, I actually saw that article when it was first published a few weeks ago, and deemed it unworthy of a response. I shall not waste time commenting on it now.

The essential thing to retain from all this is that the Obama doctrine is a fail-safe doctrine. When the strategy works, it does well. When it fails, it causes minimal damage if any. After a century of wars during which time America went from being the triumphant darling of humanity to being a pariah in every neighborhood, Obama found the correct formula to heal the wounds and give America a better place on which to stand.

But as always, to heal a wound means to expose it. When this happens, those who wish to see it healed express dismay at what they now realize was hidden from them all that time. Those who do not wish to see it healed plot to sabotage the effort.

The noise is getting louder as the evil ones throw darts at Obama while screaming their displeasure at the fact that America and the world stand with him, cheer him on and wish him good luck.

We'll just have to endure till the mission is truly accomplished, and the evil ones are vanquished for ever.