Oh, what high expectations we had of Obama, and how little they’ve been fulfilled! Granted, he’s come through with healthcare, and the Republican Congress often stymies his good efforts; but lately Obama seems to be phoning in his performance. Yesterday the New York Times called him out on two accounts: his failure to fulfill his promises to work against the federal death penalty, and the administration’s waffling and ultimate lying about our engagement in Afghanistan. (Indented statements from the Times.)
On the federal death penalty:
Inside the Justice Department, some officials opposed a formal moratorium because it would eliminate the option for the death penalty in terrorism cases like the one against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who faces a possible death sentence for the 2013 bombings at the Boston Marathon. Others worried that eliminating the death penalty would make it harder to persuade Congress to move terrorist suspects from the island prison at Guantánamo Bay to the United States for trial.
Why should there be an option for the death penalty for terrorists? It’s clearly not a deterrent to terrorism; indeed, Muslim terrorist often seek death and martyrdom. The only valid reason is retribution, which I don’t see as justifiable, especially in light of my determinism. Further, killing someone costs more than putting them in jail for life without parole. Finally, if you make a mistake with conviction, you can’t bring back someone you’ve killed. It was in Attorney General Eric Holder who ordered federal prosecutors to request the death penalty for Tsarnaev, and you can bet he wouldn’t have done that without Obama’s approval.
There were also logistical hurdles. Advocates and administration officials asked what would happen to the roughly five dozen people on federal death row. Would Mr. Obama, who has said the death penalty was appropriate in some cases, commute the sentences of men who raped and murdered people? There were no clear answers.
Let him exercise some leadership and come out against the death penalty, then. Yes, commute the executions to long prison terms or life without parole. Why isn’t that a clear answer?
In the end, the question never made it to Mr. Obama’s desk. Last fall, Mr. Holder announced plans to resign, and officials said it would be inappropriate to recommend a major policy change on his way out of office, then leave it up to his successor to carry it out.
Hillary? Are you kidding?
Obama long ago promised that, after the U.S. ceased having any direct combat role in Afghanistan, the U.S. military left in the country would be limited to training and advising Afghan troops, and would slowly leave completely. Well, the NYT says that’s not true:
Rather than ending the American war in Afghanistan, the military is using its wide latitude to instead transform it into a continuing campaign of airstrikes — mostly drone missions — and Special Operations raids that have in practice stretched or broken the parameters publicly described by the White House.
Western and military officials said that American and NATO forces conducted 52 airstrikes in March, months after the official end of the combat mission. Many of these air assaults, which totaled 128 in the first three months of this year, targeted low- to midlevel Taliban commanders in the most remote reaches of Afghanistan.
As early as January, when officials in Washington were hailing the end of the combat mission, about 40 American Special Operations troops were deployed to Kunar Province to advise Afghan forces that were engaged with the Taliban over a handful of villages along the border with Pakistan.
With the troops on the ground, the command for the American-led coalition called in airstrikes under the authority of force protection, according to two Western military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details of the operation were not public.
“They are putting guys on the ground in places to justify the airstrikes,” one of the officials said. “It’s not force protection when they are going on the offensive.”
. . . Now, though, the distance seems to be widening between the administration’s public statements and what the military appears to be doing, whether at the behest of the White House or on its own, officials here said.
There’s more, but you can read it for yourself. All administrations dissimulate, but I didn’t think Obama would renege on his promise to draw down American troops, a withdrawal he slowed in March. The fact is that the Afghan army is unable beat the Taliban, and so we’re committed to an eternal presence in that country. The moment we leave the country the battle will resume in earnest, and the victors will not be our allies.
The only difference between this and Vietnam is that we had at least some justification for invading Afghanistan. Now, like Vietnam, it’s become a tarpit: an endless war of attrition.
You are so right – I voted for Obama once. A vast disappointment he is. Just another pol. And evidently owned by the pentagon, CIA, the weapons mfgrs, Israel( inspire of his dislike of Netenyahoo). He seems timid about standing for anything….
Anybody else remember his campaign promise half a dozen years ago to end the Afghan war “by the end of next year”? And how, ever since then, up until recently, he’s always promised to end the Afghan war “by the end of next year”?
Now, of course, he’s promised to keep it going for at least another ten, maybe fifteen years or who knows how much longer?
Let’s not forget that this is a war we started almost fifteen years ago already. Obama’s just as much promised that we will have midlevel career officers in Afghanistan who weren’t even born when the first shots were fired.
…and he only “came through with healthcare” for the insurance rackets. Actual reform would have been Medicare for all; instead, we got the archconservative wet dream of everybody being forced to do business with one of the most corrupt and hated insurance industries in the history of civilization.
I voted for Cynthia McKenney the first time, but I really did have high hopes that Obama would live up to his hype. Damn but I’ve been disappointed in him.
b&
Bingo and… bingo. I bristle at the word “care” being used when the word “insurance” applies.
Sub
“Granted, he’s come through with healthcare . . .” ? I disagree. He shilly-shallied on healthcare while the Teapublicans gutted it of the only true reform it contained, the “Public Option.” What finally passed was slightly better than nothing, but only slightly.
I disagree on two points:
1. The public option as it was written would have saved money (based on the CBO’s own estimates I think it was something like $70 billion over ten years), but it wasn’t the centerpiece of the reform. The Affordable Care Act could achieve its aims without the public option. Keep in mind, the uninsured rate is down 5% since 2010, even after the Supreme Court ruled against mandatory Medicaid expansion. I think it’s unfair to call the expansion of health coverage to millions of people slightly better than nothing.
2. The death of the public option had as much to do with intransigence from a few Democrats (who, by the way, were absolutely essential for reaching the 60 vote threshold needed to overcome the filibuster). The Democrats had a choice either to pick a fight within their own party and potentially destroy any chances of passing a reform bill (many people were already calling on Democrats to give up), or ditch the public option and pass a slightly less robust bill. I think they made the right decision.
The extended, never ending war in Afghanistan has never made any sense. We should have left in the fall of 2001 after we failed to get Ben Laden the first time. Nothing that happened after was anything but bad and costly.
The American political system and military have a history of never leaving. Take a look at the small Island of Okinawa sometime if you want a history lesson. We invaded in 1945 toward the last part of WWII and there we stayed. We even gave Okinawa back to Japan in 1972 but we still stayed on. We still have close to 20 or 30 thousand military on this Island today. The question is the same…why?
The other day when the Japan Prime Minister was visiting Obama, he made a few comments and again said we were going to remove some of the troops in Okinawa to Guam. This plan has been going on for 20 years and still, nothing.
It’s what empires do, and have done for as long as there’ve been empires.
It’s worth noting that, historically, once an empire attempts to swallow Afghanistan, it tends to not survive for long after the experience. Most recently we saw this with the Soviet Empire…but also the British Empire…Alexander the Great….
b&
Yes indeed. The really crazy thing about this repeated history is — you would think maybe we could learn from the past. The Romans went down, the British Empire, Soviets and others. The destruction or reversal is always self-inflicted, not caused from outside invasion. So why do we spend more on defense than the next 15 or so countries combined?
This graphic can help put things into perspective:
http://dudelol.com/DO-NOT-HOTLINK-IMAGES/All-the-aircraft-carriers-of-the-world.gif
Remember, that’s just aircraft carriers, one part of one branch of the armed forces…and a single US aircraft carrier would be sufficient to utterly destroy any nation that doesn’t have one. As in, we could bomb, say, Iran back into the stone age just using a single carrier if we didn’t care about niceties like civilian casualties. And, of course, ignoring all the political barriers to that sort of thing…my point is about the military might of a single carrier, not about the practicality or morality of wielding that might.
b&
That graphic is not accurate. Several of the carriers shown (at least for the US) are no longer in active service. The US has 19 active carriers of all types, I count 26 in that chart. The 2nd one down for example, CV-67 USS JFK was decommissioned in 2007. As for your point about one carrier could take out an entire country, that only stands for the 10 US super carriers. Most of the rest are helicopter assault ships, best used for evacuating civilians from harm’s way and delivering relief supplies/medical aid into disaster areas (a role the Navy is called on more and more to do). That chart also shows the UK with 7 carriers, they only have 1 (with two more being readied). I’m sure there are more inaccuracies, if I cared to check.
The main thrust of your comment stands though (that we outgun everyone else combined). I’m glad we do.
Glad… because you naturally expect the rest of the world to stand united in opposition to the Great Satan?
It’s probably a good thing to have nukes targeted on all your ‘allies’ as well. It’s the only way to be sure.
Try getting your average Republican to see that, and even if they do, they’ll think it won’t happen to America because she is exceptional in every way.
Ironically, the top military leaders do seem to see it, and are trying to move their focus and priorities.
The republicans would be wondering why you are not building more. And just think, each carrier is around 5000 people plus a bunch of additional support ships. Not a defensive weapon. And yet…they say the air force gets all the money.
The end of the British Empire had nothing to do with our campaigns in Afghanistan. We gave up the empire because we were bankrupt, overstretched and exhausted in the aftermath of WW2, and also because majority opinion acknowledged that the age of colonial empires had run its course and it was time to make a graceful exit – which, for the most part, we did.
Of course, many of our former colonial possessions, particularly those in Africa, would be much more peaceful, stable and prosperous places today if we’d stayed on, but that’s another story.
And as for executing convicted terrorists and continuing the campaign of air strikes in Afghanistan – I approve of both. If “attrition” is measured in terms of dead jihadists, then I’m all for it.
Please do not think that I or any of us were saying the British Empire as we all knew it was ended by anything in Afghanistan. At least not from me. Over extended colonialism that later reversed one by one and the two world wars were major events in British decline.
“Ditto.”
As I’ve heard it said, Afghanistan is where empires go to die. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Afghanistan is a significant factor in their deaths.
Take the Soviets. Was their own war in Afghanistan a factor in their breakup? Perhaps, but certainly not the biggest one, and more of a symptom than anything else.
Our own interminable presence in Afghanistan is a symptom of the same disease, whatever it is.
b&
Disease is probably a good way to put it. On the original thread regarding capital punishment — I did not know that Obama had campaigned on that, one way or the other. The large let down for me was his Clinton like performance with the money people, wall street and big business. It’s like being a democrat in name but a republican in action.
By any rational objective measure, the Obama presidency has been significantly far to the right of any other in American history. We still have all the ultra-far-hard-right policies of the Bush era, including warrantless wiretaps and assassination and foreign wars and foreign gulags and internal passports and travel checkpoints and all the rest, in many cases greatly expanded and worsened under Obama. Even Obamacare was too far to the radical right to be anything but a joke when first proposed by the Heritage Fund.
You could maybe blame a failure to pull back as far as he’d like on the Republicans…but we’ve not only not pulled back, we’ve gone ahead full steam with no signs of letting up. Rhetoric and empty promises about wishing we could let up, yet, but no actual reining in the tyrannical excesses of his predecessor — quite the opposite.
That’s not something you can blame Republicans for.
b&
Just a little nitpick. Alexander had no serious problems with “conquering” Afghanistan. If any place could be said to have been “the place Alexander’s campaign went to die,” that would be India.
But that isn’t what brought Alexander down. What brought him down was over-extension, the loss of committment from his native troops (they’de been on campaign most of their lives and traveled far beyond their known world), and finally his own death from disease (or poison maybe) upon which his empire pretty much instantly shattered and was divided up by his generals and governers.
Yes, exactly.
By whatever coincidence, those sorts of things seem to be either in play or right around the corner by the time empires make it to Afghanistan.
Consider: there are teenagers today who weren’t yet born when American boots first hit the ground in Afghanistan who’ll assuredly get deployed there before the end of the next presidential term.
This is some serious bad shit.
b&
“We still have close to 20 or 30 thousand military on this Island today. The question is the same…why?”
And the other question is, how do they keep busy?
I have no regrets regarding my having voted for President Obama. That is not to say that I haven’t been disappointed with on decision or another but, in the aggregate, I’m quite glad I voted for him.
I can’t imagine being in his position considering the Republican resolve to fight him at every turn even when he espouses Republican ideas. And just as I never forgot Venezuela’s Chavez disrespecting President Bush, I will never forget Netanyahu’s disrespecting President Obama.
I agree. I think it is clear he made a very serious effort and basically did end it, bringing all troops home except for a few hundred, until… Well, ISIS/DESH. I certainly don’t think DESH is an threat to the US, but if they are threatening to overcome the govt’s of Iraq and Afghanistan, I think we ought to do something, though for the life of me, I don’t know what that is or why it should “work”. So, in the end, I am resigned to accept that the President has his heart in the right place and does the best he can, etc., etc. – I just know one thing for sure, just one, if any Republican had control of the White House, we would be in 5 more wars than we are in now.
You remember how a bunch of us ripped the Bush administration at the time of their “Shock and Awe” campaign about their naïve notions that the Iraqis were, Shirley, going to welcome us with open arms and bouquets of flowers?
A bunch of us said the exact same thing about the attempts to install a “democracy” in the power vacuum left by Hussein and pour money into the remnants of the Iraqi army.
Just as we said, “We told you so!” to Bush when it turned out that the Iraqis despised us for the havoc we wreaked upon them, we also said, “I told you to!” to Obama when the Iraqi government collapsed and the Iraqi army handed all those US-taxpayer-bought weapons over to DAESH without a fight.
Of course there’s an urge that something must be done, and so we wind up doing something.
But the fact remains that, as we should have learned in Vietnam if not Korea and countless times since, just because you wish you could do something to help doesn’t mean that your help is welcome nor that anything you could even hypothetically do would actually help.
Basically, that part of the world is fucked, and we’re the ones who saw to it that it would get fucked. And we can keep fucking it up and keep making it worse, or we can stop fucking it up and it’ll still stay fucked up, just not as badly fucked up as it will be if we keep fucking it up.
Well, okay. We could airdrop $20 bills at the same rate of dollars / hour that we’ve been spending on military expeditions there. Just parachuted small bundles of bills randomly distributed across populated areas. That would probably actually do a great deal to make that part of the world a much better place, and it wouldn’t cost us any more than what we’re currently spending. But that would be Socialism, or some other un-American -ism, and thus of the Devil or some such. Definitely not Christian, at least — and this is a Christian nation, after all, and Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t.
b&
You speak the truth, and I was there with you about Iraq, and even Afghanistan (though I did have a secret bit of gladness when the Taliban were ousted). But now, we broke it, we owe them something, and maybe that something is we try to help get rid of these DESH morons. I believe that the average people there are desperate for help now, unlike in 2003 (in iraq for example). I don’t know, I was a child during Vietnam and I grew up hating it and believe we would learn not to interfere, and “we” didn’t and I was opposed to every war fought by the US since Vietnam, and now I find myself looking at the situation thinking “Damn, we (bush) made things so much worse, maybe we do have an obligation now to try and prevent this reign of slaughter and darkness from descending on them”. We set the monkey loose. And yet, you are most likely correct, there is nothing we can really do. Sorry, I am conflicted, but not convinced we should do nothing.
When somebody comes up with a proposal for “do something” that actually has a reasonable chance of success and most emphatically isn’t more of the same that created the mess in the first place, then I’ll entertain the thought.
b&
Although Obama hasn’t lived up to the hype, I would think you’d all rather have him than the alternatives: McCain/Palin or Romney/Ryan.
A lot of what he’s tried to do has been destroyed by the Republicans, many of whom seem to take his win very personally.
Having said that, it’s appalling that America still has the death penalty. It’s almost the only Western nation to retain it, which I personally think goes hand in hand with the large proportion of right-wing religious. All that “eye for an eye” stuff.
I often wonder if the American military is a form of social security. All those people being paid by the state. Trouble is, they get so damaged, both physically and mentally, in the process. Though that in turn creates jobs to look after them. Healthcare might not be in such short supply for your poor though if there weren’t so many veterans needing help.
yep. better for us to be complaining about Obama’s slid to the center, than for us to be suffering under McCain/Palin/Romney/Ryan slither to the far right. I may not be happy with all Obama has done (or not done) but it sure beats the hell out of what would have been otherwise!
and I agree with your military comment. In red states, defense spending is patriotic pork. no matter how much it costs, it is always acceptable to spend more on the military than it is to fund education, environmental protection, or social safety nets. It’s also why it was good that NASA was so tied to the Air Force and spread out among several southern states; leads to less cutting (although Obama did destroy the Constellation program) and a backhanded republican support for science, even, *gasp* climate change studies!
Dear Muslima,
At least he’s not secretly bombing Laos.
It’s been said that power is an aphrodisiac I’m thinking it’s more of an hallucinogen.
Obama 2007: Yes, we can!
Obama 2015: Well, maybe we could’ve…
The most worrisome thing about Obama’s disappointing performance is that it makes it much more likely a Republican president will follow him.
The US doesn’t really have a left of center party. It has a right wing party and an extreme right wing party. Looked at from a Canadian perspective, on most things the Democrats are well to the right of the Canadian Conservative party and most Canadians don’t like the Conservatives. But then we have another problem: 65% of Canadians regularly vote for left of center parties but we’ve been saddled with the Conservatives for the last 10 years because the left wing vote is split three or four ways and the parties won’t join in a coalition.
Richard (a transplanted – former American – Canadian)
Or as I put it, the US federal system has: plutocrats, and theocratic plutocrats.