Do you agree with Nicholas Kristof’s point, made in the New York Times, that President Obama’s biggest mistake was not intervening forcefully in Syria?
I admire Obama for expanding health care and averting a nuclear crisis with Iran, but allowing Syria’s civil war and suffering to drag on unchallenged has been his worst mistake, casting a shadow over his legacy. It is also a stain on all of us, analogous to the indifference toward Jewish refugees in the 1930s, to the eyes averted from Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, to Darfur in the 2000s.
This is a crisis that cries out for American leadership, and Obama hasn’t shown enough.
That’s the kind of thinking that makes me wonder if a good strategy on any given issue wouldn’t be to find out what Nicholas Kristof is recommending and do the opposite.
Here are some questions that I think that Mr. Kristof should consider. What was the U. S. role in fomenting the rebellion against Assad? Would it have existed at all without external support? Have our actions in training and supporting the rebels actually prolonged and aggravated the carnage rather than bringing about the removal of Assad?
As to President Obama’s biggest mistake I think it’s a broad field so it’s difficult to choose. Keynesians would probably say that not pushing a larger stimulus package was his biggest error. Foes of the Affordable Care Act would say that signing that into law was his biggest mistake.
I’m sure there are diehards out there who don’t think that the president has made any mistakes. If I were pressed to the wall, I’m torn between the Afghan Surge and not following through on the promise of his first election campaign and starting out with a national unity government.
A unity government? I am surprised that anyone wold think that was possible in recent history. The Surge, in retrospect was a mistake, but I think it unlikely any new president would have opposed it when the entire DOD and military complex was behind it, excepting Ike. I think not taking a shot at tax reform was a big mistake. Obama being mostly a centrist, I would hope he could have made an alliance and got something. That said, it would have had to be done before the Tea Party came to power. Libya was also, in retrospect, a bad idea. I would have liked to have even less involvement in Syria, but it sounds like most of his advisers have been pushing for more, as has the GOP.
Steve
Libya, the lack of debt relief for actual humans, the creation of our Central Asian special ops/drone/contractor province.
I agree that Libya was a terrible mistake. And I honestly don’t understand how people defend the drone war.
As to debt relief, I’ve been beating that drum since 2008.
steve:
Since I opposed both the Afghan Surge and the intervention in Libya in prospect, characterizing those decisions as wrong in retrospect is only telling half the story. Basically, both decisions were obviously wrong and quite a number of people said so.
The Afghan surge was such a cynical operation that I doubt anybody believed it would work. Libya had its believers.
Yes. They were all European oil companies.
Kristof’s wrong. Obama’s worst mistake was failing to work a deal to keep a military/diplomatic presence in Iraq. Had we stayed, we could’ve kept Malicki away from his worser impulses such as him alienating and disenfranchising Sunnis, and the Islamic State would have taken no territory in Iraq. The militant Islamist group would have been poorer and smaller, basically confined to eastern Syria. That would’ve changed the dynamic in Syria.
Obama’s other huge mistake was dropping a billion worth of bombs on Libya, leaving a political/security vacuum and then doing basically nothing in the aftermath. This is a failure to learn the lessons of Iraq, where we took out a dictator and thereby created a chaotic/anarchic situation for far too long.
The only way those would have been possible is if we had planned to stay long term and more or less dictated Iraq’s constitution to the Iraqis (as we did the Germans and Japanese). That was never in the plan.
Elections have consequences, Dave. McCain said on the campaign trail that he envisioned an American troop presence in Iraq akin to what we have in South Korea. Had there been a different US electoral outcome, there would been have a different Strategic Framework Agreement and different Status of Forces Agreement. Instead, we get a Barack Hussein Obama who was looking for the easiest excuse to get out so that he could claim that he fulfilled a campaign pledge and crow, “I ended the war in Iraq,” as if disengaging and withdrawing = ending a conflict.
… debt relief …
I would assume this was a joke, but I know it is not. The president who appointed Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury NEVER had any intentions of causing Wall Street to forfeit one thin dime. The only way to not know this is to willfully stick one’s head in the sand and pour cement over it.
For the three people who may not know, Timmy was at the NY Fed, and for years he was actively protecting the worst housing abusers. When he was Secretary of Treasury, he actively worked to get the Wall Street banks off of TARP because it was preventing their bonuses, and this included the worst of them.
(Some of the banks went from TARP to another less harsh government program. TARP was repaid, but nobody mentions with government money.)
TARP could have been used to stabilize the system by providing debt stability to many homeowners. The regulated parts of the Financial Industry would have been able to weather the crisis by keeping financially capable people in their homes. There would have been no “free lunch”. Debt relief would be a permanent lien on a person’s income and assets until the debt was paid-off. Otherwise, interest rates would be renegotiated.
If mortgage holders did not want to cooperate, harsh measures could be enacted – special fees or tax provisions for uninhabited property. The government can always dream up new ways to get around anything they are prohibited from doing.
But, this would have meant that political donors would have been f*cked, and we cannot have that.
It has been a long, long time since I had my epiphany about the system being rigged. It was long before I had Internet access or knew it existed. Back then, you cut-out newspaper articles, took notes, and wrote in the margins of books. There was no blogs, cable news, talk radio, etc. You had to put two-and-two together yourself, and it was understandable that most people thought people like me were crazy.
Today, all this is a quick Google search away, but our “informed voters” refuse to know anything other than the political pablum fed to them. Anybody lacking the knowledge to repeat this bullsh*t is deemed a low information voter.
Let me help you all: President Obama has been a resounding success on debt. He has not allowed anybody to get past his Wall Street sponsors, and he has saddled millions of young adults with non-dischargeable debt for a future Democrat president to save them from.
If President Bush or a President Romney worked non-stop for a hundred years, they would never have been able to achieve what President Obama did. A vote for Barack Obama was supposed to be a vote for one’s economic interests. If you were rich, it sure as hell was.
1) Pat Lang supported the intervention in Libya. We still don’t know the counterfactual. Maybe we end up with a country in disarray and just as many refugees as we have now. I doubt it, but reasonable people thought it was likely.
2) “Obama’s worst mistake was failing to work a deal to keep a military/diplomatic presence in Iraq.”
The time to negotiate that deal was while we still had leverage. You don’t agree to leave, then change your mind. I certainly would not want to have been deployed there without immunity. That said, staying would have been a mistake. Playing bodyguard for Maliki while he was abusive was not a good role for us. We couldn’t get Maliki to play nicely while we were still there.
The lesson to be learned from Iraq is that we suck at nation building. Toppling dictators when we have no idea what will follow is a bad idea. Same pretty much goes for Libya, where we at least didn’t lose trillions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to prove we don’t know how to nation build.
Steve
Pat has since learned better. A perfect example of “too soon ve get old too late ve get shmart.”
His dislike of Qaddafi overwhelmed his judgment.
Steve, the troops could have had immunity but Obama insisted that such immunity be approved by the Iraqi parliament, which was unnecessary because Malicki could’ve done it by executive action. This was the phony-baloney excuse for cutting and running that Obama was looking for, and he used it.
Fast forward to today. We have over 5,000 troops in-country (we don’t know how many exactly because the Pentagon has been less than forthcoming and forthright) and they all have immunity via the exchange of diplomatic notes. No parliamentary approval necessary.
Why do we have to go through this over and over. If you are going to do something, be a man and have the balls to stand behind your project. If President Bush could not decide whether it was a good idea to stay or go, he should have left the entire operation to his successor to make the decision.
President Bush decided to put on his “big boy pants” and invade Iraq. If he was man enough to invade an entire country, he was man enough to establish long term leases for the bases needed to complete his project. Otherwise, he should have turned the project over to VP Cheney. I suspect he would have had the bases in a few minutes. (add Godfather reference)
Candidate Obama stated that as president he would end the Iraq War. He was not elusive about it. If anybody voted for him, they knew or willfully decided not to know that he was going to pull the troops out.
Iraq did not need US troops until the end of time. Iraq needed and needs (wait for it) a Saddam Hussein type bastard but a US bastard.
Just for fun, how long is the US going to stay in Afghanistan – 10, 20 100, 200, 1,000 years? More, less? Please explain. Really anything. “Space invasion in 2022 with space invaders killing all racists. Muslims have no reason to act out, and there is Peace on Earth.”
I assume you’re talking to me, Tasty. Like I said, elections have consequences and Bush had no leverage in SFA negotiations with Obama as incoming president. We all knew that Obama wanted to remove all the troops, and I’m saying that it was his worst decision given how the country disintegrated and how the Islamic State emerged. I’m not saying our military/diplomatic presence should’ve been there forever, but it’s fairly obvious that we weren’t there long enough. After the last soldier left in December 2011, Malicki displayed his worst behavior by placing his Sunni VP under arrest, stopped paying Sunni militias, and basically so alienated Sunnis that they’d rather align with terrorists than be terrorized by their own government. While we were there, we were able to exert some influence on the guy, but alas.
Steve,
“The Surge, in retrospect was a mistake, but I think it unlikely any new president would have opposed it when the entire DOD and military complex was behind it, excepting Ike.”
The President was for a surge before he won the election – the only question was how big and to what end. As far as the “entire DoD” being behind it, I certainly don’t remember it that way.
Warrenpease,
“Obama’s worst mistake was failing to work a deal to keep a military/diplomatic presence in Iraq.”
He ran on withdrawal from Iraq, his predecessor negotiated a complete exit that he chose not to try to renegotiate. It’s unlikely a token US force would keep the Sunni’s and Shia from going at each other. At best, it might have prevented the fall of Mosul and the complete route of most of the Iraqi Army, but that would depend a LOT on force structure, embedding and a lot of political and operational decisions that we can’t guess at.
The problems of Iraq are endemic and any US military presence would just be a band-aid. I, for one, do not think it is worth the lives to kick the can down the road for X number of years.
@WarrenPeese
I guess General MAcArthur had no leverage with the Japanese either. Grow up and join the adults in the real world. If Saddam was the horrible person everybody claims he was, I am fairly certain the Iraqis could/can be brought into line. It is a rough part of the world, and if you are too squeamish to do what it takes, you are too weak to be there. Stop wasting everybody’s time and get out.
On one hand, we have the terrorists, Iranians, Russians, Syrians, etc. who are able to get what they want with a dirty look, but you claim that the Americans are too weak to be able to do anything but, nonetheless, will prevail in everything.
Get your story straight. The US cannot be the 98 pound weakling and Superman at the same time. Let me state for the 47,000th time, the day after the invasion, you secure permanent bases. You write the leases, and you get the local dog catcher to sign them. If no dog catcher exists, you create the position and appoint somebody.
(You bring along some “drop WMD”, and you “find it”, one way or the other.)
If you are going to invade a country, invade the country and stop giving excuses why you cannot invade it properly. If you cannot do it right, stay at home, and play Battle.
I am rather tired of the entire argument. We now have two totally different approaches to totally f*cking up a country and destabilizing a region, and rather than a discussion on how not to do it a third time, it is as if it never happened.
Iraq invasion happened, and it was over. There is nothing anybody can do about it but learn from it. President Obama withdrew from Iraq, and he should have stayed the hell out. Now that he has gone back in, you can bitch about something. He has no place to base the troops or equipment he needs for his new found love of invading, but of course, that is not going to stop him.
Mubarak and Gaddafi should be in power. If their countries did not need them, they would not have been in charge. (Assad was there by default. He probably would never have been able to take the country by himself, and his daddy would never have allowed this crap to drag out this long.)
(Musharrif should still be in power, and Pakistan would be a lot better. A different idiot president thought it was a good idea to get rid of him. Here is a suggestion: no more alcoholics, coke addicts, or pot heads as president.)
Can we just agree electing another p*ssy for president won’t help?
Andy,
The Islamic State did not grow to the extent it did until after all our troops left. Second, except for a short period in Fallujah, militant Islamists held no territory in Iraq until after our troops left. I know that people will respond that correlation is not causation, but there is no reason to believe that the Islamic State would have taken Mosul, let alone other parts of the country. We’re seeing the result of Obama’s passivity today, including a country that cannot govern itself, a refugee problem that is adversely affecting Europe, and a terrorist organization that has its entrenched home base and is exporting its terrorism beyond the Syriaq borders.
Tasty,
I’m not sure what you’re saying. My position is that Obama should have negotiated a deal to keep American combat forces (and a healthy diplomatic corps) in Iraq to preserve stability in an obviously fragile country that only had a free election just a handful of years earlier. Obama also should have supported Allawi in the 2010 election since he and his coalition actually had more votes. A president with some stones and common sense would’ve done that, and this president has neither.
But now that the damage is done, comes different prescriptions, and I think his current half-assed “strategy” is short-sighted and stupid. Either go with (1) a real containment policy protects our real allies (Iraqi Kurdistan and Jordan) and does not help an Iranian-backed Iraqi government that helped create this problem or (2) Go Big and redraw the map in Iraq and Syria. Since the Islamic State does not pose a direct or imminent threat to the United States, protect Iraqi Kurdistan and Jordan and let Allah sort the rest out.
@WarrenPeese
President Bush negotiated the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. If you have a problem with no troops being in Iraq, you need to take it up with him. Perhaps we should discuss the dumb-assed idea to bring Jeffersonian style liberal democracy to the Middle East. Any idea on what dumb f*ck President thought that would be a good idea? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
The only US ally in the region is Turkey. The others are (or were) client states, and yes, this includes Israel.
If you want to redraw borders, you need to control land, and if you want to control land, you need bases. You do not do this by re-negotiating leases and agreements every few years. This is not like renting an apartment.
President Obama’s view of how the world works is silly and childish, and why anybody would want him doing any more than the absolute minimum is beyond me. He got out, and he should have stayed out. The strong men in the Middle East know how to take care of business.
ISIS is what it is because of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. They are the ones that fund it. Assad is only in power because the Europeans screwed the Russians in Libya. Coups are not engineered by Facebook users from their parents basement.
I hate to break the news to you and others like you, but most Americans are far too squeamish to do what is required to rule in this part of the world. The Iraqis thought the US invasion was great for about 10 minutes. Then, they realized that they would be terrorized by a new group of people, and the US would stand by while they (the Iraqis) were slaughtered. Saddam kept most of them safe most of the time, but he was not worried about offending anybody’s sensibilities in getting the job done. If you got on his bad side, having your head dunked under water was the least of your problems.
There are troops in Afghanistan, and it ain’t making a bit of difference. Why would Iraq be any different? The Iraq that you all want is the 51 US state. You will need to provide the political and civil service workers in addition to the police and military.
If you want a blueprint, read up on the British in India, and if that is OK with you, you should develop a plan. Otherwise, it is just political sloganeering. Some of us know what Barack Obama the man is, and we really do not need to fling shit at him sullying the Office of US President in the process. We have monkeys to do that, and they are called progressives.
Tasty, Bush negotiated what he did (which occurred after the election but before the inauguration) because elections have consequences. You work with the leverage you have, not what you wish you had. And it takes nothing away from Obama’s biggest mistake, the failure to extend the agreement. The situation in Iraq was working while we had a military/diplomatic presence, and it cratered not long after we left because everyone with knowledge of the situation understood the fragility of the Iraqi state.
I agree that Turkey is an ally by treaty, and that’s as far as it goes. The Erdogan post-“coup” purge is not a good sign. I also agree that Turkey and KSA contributed to the growth and strength of the Islamic State.
As for “redrawing the borders”, I would only go for that if the Islamic State poses a direct or imminent threat, which they do not. The smarter course is a containment.
As for Afghanistan, we do have troops there but not that many. Clearly, Obama saw the problem with withdrawing all of them in Iraq while militant Islamists were still up to mischief. The situation is still a mess but the Taliban is still out of power, which is good enough.
@WarrenPeese
You live in a dream world created by political pundits. In this world, the events prior to The Surge either did not occur or were of no matter. Let me help you.
The US had lots of troops, and they were not just hanging in the rear with the gear. There were functional bases, equipment, repair facilities, ammo dumps, medical stations, etc., and they were as safe as could be in a war zone.
Before The Surge, they could not establish order, and this was the reason why The Surge was required. Prior to the chaos that required The Surge, it was “working” also. I would suggest that it was “working” a lot better than it was before President Bush decided to withdraw the troops.
A good time to discuss long term bases might have been right before deploying troops for The Surge. I suspect that President Bush could have gotten anything he wanted. Immediate threat of physical violence has a way of focusing the mind. There is your leverage. Next problem.
Keeping troops in a place while it goes to hell does not do anything for you. It makes you look weak and ineffective. Getting pushed around by a ragtag group of terrorists is even worse. If you want to be over there, you are going to need to use the same methods every other dictator uses, or you will need to pay somebody else to do it.
President Bush knew it, and he negotiated his legacy which is why he pulled out the troops. He figured out too late he made a big f*cking mistake, but he still did not have the balls to own it.
Warren- Would you want to deploy to a country where immunity rested upon the word of one person? Not me. If immunity depended entirely upon Maliki, then he could withdraw it anytime he wanted. We would have been his hired hitmen. (Just game this out.) What you forget also, and the reason Maliki would not do this, is Maliki needed to form a coalition government. Heaven knows the Sadrists didn’t want us there. Maliki couldn’t even bring this up as an issue for fear of losing support.
IS wasn’t really much more than a bunch of head choppers until they got Saddam’s old military to sign up. Then they had the logistical ability and tactical knowledge to run a real campaign. Given that we had made zero progress on resolving the political situation in Iraq before we left, it was only a matter of time before this happened. Given that we cannot get politicians in our own country to work together, it is hopelessly naive, stupid really, to think we could just stay there forever and make them learn to play nice with each other. We lost enough lives trying to do this. Really, if they wanted us to stay they should have begged us to do so, and offered to help pay.
Steve
Tasty, nice theory, but it’s full of s**t. Talk about “dream world”.
Steve, then you should agree with me that we shouldn’t have troops in Iraq right now and should stay with a real containment policy. After all, the immunity our troops have right now hangs on an exchange of diplomatic notes, nothing more. FTR, we have immunity agreements with dozens of other countries where we have troops. Far as I know, Iraq is the only country where we insisted that it go through parliament first.
By all accounts, the surge strategy was working and casualties–both civilian and military–dropped significantly. Even Obama and Biden had to begrudgingly acknowledge that. Part of the reason was that we were successful at bringing Sunnis into the equation. The Sunnis didn’t bail until after we left and after Malicki started behaving like a first-class d**khead.
@WarrenPeese
So, which part is full of shit?
(1) Iraq Invasion.
(2) Iraqis were grateful until everybody was fired.
(3) Until the last few years, there were forward deployed troops.
(4) There were facilities to base large numbers of troops.
(5) All over the country, there were still Iraqis Gone Wild.
(6) There was a US troop presence in Iraq during all this time.
(7) The Surge was due to the Iraqis disregarding the US troop presence.
(8) Much of The Surge strategy was accomplished by paying off the Sunni bosses (call them what you want).
You can draw from this that the Iraqis saw the error of their ways, and with a few US troops, they were going to behave themselves.
What exactly do you think The Surge was about? I realize that the political pundits gloss over it, and in truth, most do not have the slightest idea of the implications. This is probably what is confusing you. I am not giving you the standard nonsense you need to fire off your standard responses.
Warren–I have said repeatedly I would like for us to have as little to do with Iraq and Syria as possible. At any rate, in 2011 the Iraqi government was divided on having us stay. The Sadrists, who had killed US troops wanted us out. Iran, empowered by our war in Iraq, wanted us out. Maliki’s own lawyers, as did ours, thought that an agreement signed by Maliki needed to be ratified by parliament. Parliament wanted to project power and confidence while the Arab Spring was blooming.
If Malki and his party were the only ones really wanting us to stay, then we would have been there at their mercy without the approval of parliament. No way we do that. We should have stayed only if they asked to stay, begged us really, and even then I am not sure we should have. We were going to leave 5k-10k trainers. We had been training the Iraqi army for what, 6-7 years at that point? All those reports from our military telling us how wonderful they were performing. In reality they sucked. Again, if Maliki want going to resolve political differences with the Sunnis and Kurds while we had 100k troops in country, why would he do it when we had 10k.
Steve