A President Whose Assurances Have Come Back to Haunt Him
By PETER BAKERSEPT. 8, 2014
WASHINGTON — When President Obama addresses the nation on Wednesday to explain his plan to defeat Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, it is a fair bet he will not call them the “JV team.”
Nor does he seem likely to describe Iraq as “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” with a “representative government.” And presumably he will not assert after more than a decade of conflict that “the tide of war is receding.”
As he seeks to rally Americans behind a new military campaign in the Middle East, Mr. Obama finds his own past statements coming back to haunt him. Time and again, he has expressed assessments of the world that in the harsh glare of hindsight look out of kilter with the changed reality he now confronts.
In making his speech, Mr. Obama faces the challenge of reconciling those views with the new mission he is presenting to the American public to recommit the armed forces of the United States to the region he tried to leave. Rather than a junior varsity nuisance, he will try to convince Americans that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria represents a clear threat to national security in a state that is hardly stable. And he will seek to win patience for more war from a public that wishes it really was receding.
To Mr. Obama’s critics, the disparity between the president’s previous statements and today’s reality reflects not simply poorly chosen words but a fundamentally misguided view of the world. Rather than clearly see the persistent dangers as the United States approaches the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, they said, Mr. Obama perpetually imagines a world as he wishes it were.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/us/politics/a-president-whose-assurances-have-come-back-to-haunt-him.html?_r=0
The biggest threat IS poses is to Europe not the US and therefore because of American interests in Europe (as it battles with Russia on the economic war front over Ukraine) it needs to take a stand against the Islamic jihadists. What must be questioned is why the US helped to finance IS (previously ISIS / ISIL) in its uprising against President Assad of Syria – together with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the US brought this monster to the front of the battle in its attempt to overthrow Assad and now it has lost control of the situation. Republicans helped influence the financing and arming of IS and John McCain was a huge supporter of them. Oh right, that was before they started on the road to forming the caliphate and killing American journalists – another shoddy and failed mission to bring American influence to the MidEast region….when is the US ever going to learn and more importantly, when is the government and its intelligence services going to tell the truth to its own people. Enough is enough….you want to send the young men and women of the US armed forces to their deaths in a war that can not be won by military strategy alone, well then, be honest with your expectations and tell the citizens of the US the truth pertaining to the reasons behind the growth of IS and highlight the pros and cons of putting troops on the ground in Iraq to battle an ideology that has huge support amongst the Sunni Muslim populations ACROSS THE WORLD!!!!!!! The sad thing is that most Americans will listen again to the diatribe of their Administration and allow their leaders to bury more of their service men and women in a lost campaign.
Perhaps the most overmatched President of all-time.
His problem is that no matter what he says people will be skeptical given his track record of saying one thing and doing something completely opposite.