Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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No troops to Iraq? Good news

Imagine for a moment a situation in the White House, around April 1975.

North Vietnam is sending thousands of troops into South Vietnam. The United States has ended its role in that country by pulling its troops out. The South Vietnamese are left to defend themselves. They’re doing a lousy job of it.

NVA forces are storming toward Saigon and other key cities in the south. Gerald Ford’s national security team comes to him and says, “Mr. President, we have to send our troops back into South Vietnam to save that country from being conquered by the North. What’s your call, sir?”

Do you think the president ever would have given a moment of serious thought to such an idea? Hardly. President Ford didn’t do any of that. Heck, I seriously doubt that option ever was on the table.

It shouldn’t be now as Iraq fights to preserve its hard-won transition from ham-handed dictatorship to some form of democratic rule.

And that is why President Obama is correct to assert that our future involvement will not involve sending troops back to the battlefield.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/obama-we-will-do-our-part-iraq-wont-send-troops-n130536

The president today laid down an important marker for Iraq. “Over the past decade, American troops have made extraordinary sacrifices,” he said. “Any actions that we may take to provide assistance to Iraqi security forces have to be joined by a serious and sincere effort by Iraq.

The chaos “should be a wakeup call to Iraq’s leaders,” he said, and “could pose a threat eventually to American interests as well.”

Are there some military options available? Perhaps, but they should involve air power only and perhaps only in the form of unmanned aircraft, drones, that could be deployed to fire heavy ordnance at the bad guys who are seeking to take control of the country.

Americans’ “extraordinary sacrifices” included thousands of dead and wounded. The country has no appetite for more war. However, we must do “our part,” as the president said, in trying to secure a country that may be headed for the brink.

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Cool it with 'We told you so'

Congressional Republicans, quite predictably, are now declaring “We told you so!” while insurgents storm Iraqi cities and threaten to launch an all-out civil war in a country once occupied and governed by the United States of America.

Let’s cool it a bit, ladies and gents.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/john-mccain-iraq-criticize-barack-obama-107780.html?hp=t3_3

Sunni Muslims — from the very same sect that gave us Saddam Hussein — have launched full-scale attacks on key Iraq cities. They’ve taken Mosul and Tikrit and are believed to be headed toward Baghdad. The Iraqi armed forces are trying to defend the cities, but so far with little success.

The Iraqis are asking President Obama to supply air power to strike hard at the insurgents. Republicans are demanding it, too. That might be a good option for the president to employ if we can bring enough air power to bear.

Republicans opposed the president’s withdrawal from Iraq, contending that the country wasn’t yet ready to defend itself fully against terrorists and insurgents.

Thus, they’re yelling it loudly that they were right and Obama was wrong.

Sen. John McCain — who never met a war he didn’t want the United States to fight — has demanded the resignation of the president’s entire national security team, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Let’s look back, though.

* Was it prudent to launch a war against Iraq in the first place back in March 2003, when President Bush declared to the world that Saddam had chemical weapons and was going to develop nukes to launch against Israel? It turned out he had neither.

* Did the Republican president misread more than a decade ago the Iraqis’ ability to transition from totalitarianism to democratic rule when they had no history ever of living in freedom and liberty?

* Remember when Vice President Cheney said we’d be greeted as “liberators” and not “occupiers” when we invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein? It didn’t happen. The war continued for years afterward, costing us more than 4,000 young American lives.

* And aren’t Americans just sick and tired of war? Don’t public opinion surveys tell us over and over that we no longer have the stomach for wars with no end?

The Iraq War went bad from the get-go. President Bush made a colossal mistake in linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and that, I submit, is what we are reaping today.

So … the current president ought to order air strikes at the insurgents and try to put down the attacks without the use of ground forces. We’ve got plenty of ordnance we can drop on the bad guys.

As for the carping and chest-thumping on Capitol Hill, how about speaking with one voice and letting that voice belong to the commander in chief, who’s got to make the tough calls?

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Obama, Clinton set to lock arms?

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s probable campaign for the presidency is putting the man in whose administration she once worked into a complicated bind.

President Barack Obama clearly wants a Democrat to succeed him on Jan. 20, 2017 when the new president takes the oath of office. It’s been reported repeatedly that Obama and Clinton have developed a complicated relationship.

It once was testy, such as when they campaign against each other for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Sen. Obama then said to Sen. Clinton, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” Obama then won the presidency and appointed her as secretary of state.

It was then that she swallowed the Obama Kool-Aid, so to speak, and endorsed his foreign policy initiatives.

Now she’s back in “private life,” if you want to call it that. She’s written a book and is embarking on a nationwide book-promotion tour for “Hard Choices.” One of those choices might be to put some daylight between her world view and the view shared by her former political benefactor, the president.

Obama, Clinton start ’16 dance

And … oh, yes, the president’s complications get even more so. He has this vice president, Joe Biden, who also is thought to want to run for president. Vice President Biden has been indispensable at times, helping broker budget deals with his Senate pals and offering advice on a wide range of foreign policy issues and/or crises.

Their relationship also has been up and down as well. Still, Biden is the No. 2 man in the Obama administration.

Does the president choose between two of his most high-profile associates? How does he pick one while throwing the other one over? If it’s Clinton over Biden, how does the vice president continue to serve loyally and speak out publicly for the president? If it’s Biden over Clinton, how does the president deal with Hillary’s husband, the formidable 42nd president of the United States and one of the more effective surrogates Obama has employed on occasion?

It’s getting crowded at the top of the Democratic Party political pecking order.

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Envoy posts: political payoffs

It’s not exactly a dirty little secret, as many folks know this already … but ambassadorial appointments are more likely than not going to individuals who’ve helped presidents get elected or re-elected.

You can be sure as shootin’ on this one: President Obama’s appointment of Jane Hartley as the next U.S. ambassador to France is going to bring out the critics who’ll say they’re simply “shocked, shocked!” that the president would pick someone who so darn political.

Another Obama bundler named ambassador

That’s been the custom since the beginning of the Republic.

Hartley is a well-known “bundler” who helped the president win re-election in 2012. Bundlers are those who go around collecting large sums of money from various interest groups and then contribute that money to whatever political cause or candidate they support.

I have no clue whether she’s an expert on France or whether she even knows anything about The Bastille. She is yet another in a long line of ambassadorial appointments that fall into this category of so-called “political hack.”

The vast majority of the complaints will come, of course, from Republicans.

I shouldn’t have to remind our friends in the GOP — but I will anyway — that presidents from their party do the same thing. I’ll cite one example quite close to home.

The late Teel Bivins of Amarillo served in the Texas Senate for 15 years before President George W. Bush tapped him to become U.S. ambassador to Sweden. Did Bivins get the nod because he was an expert on preparing pickled herring? Oh no. He got it because of his own campaign grunt work raising money and speaking on behalf of President Bush during the 2000 campaign.

One of Bivins’s top Senate aides actually told me at the time the president was rewarding the senator for “15 years of service to Texas.” Sure thing.

Well, Teel Bivins’s service to Texas wasn’t the reason he was sent to Stockholm. Hartley’s service won’t matter when Hartley jets off — once the U.S. Senate confirms her — to take her post in Paris. It hardly ever is the case whenever presidents make these appointments.

These folks are rewarded for their “service,” all right. It’s all politics.

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'Think of these men'

Presidents of the United States often are called upon to pay tribute to their forebears, the people who made it possible — to a large degree — for them to hold the office they occupy.

President Reagan stood on a bluff overlooking Normandy’s Omaha Beach in 1984 to salute “the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” the U.S. Army Rangers who scaled the cliffs on June 6, 1944 to assault Nazi machine gun posts while launching the greatest amphibious assault in world history.

Today, one of President Reagan’s successors, President Obama, reminded the world of the courage of those men who stormed ashore that day 70 years ago, “wave after wave” of men seeking to liberate people “they had never met.”

“When you lose hope,” he said today in commemorating that monumental day, “think of these men.”

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/208446-obama-americas-claim-written-on-d-day

Indeed, cynics everywhere should think of what those men did that day — and what they had done for years prior and what they would do for another year after that landing.

Maybe a little reflection might wash away some of that cynicism.

Those brave young men saved the world from tyranny.

What’s left to say to those who are left?

Thank you.

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Congressional overreaction?

Congress’s reaction to the way President Obama brokered the deal to release Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl certainly is a serious matter.

But is it worth a loss of sleep in the residential quarters of the White House? I don’t think so.

The anger is a result of what I believe has been a nearly six-year estrangement between the White House and Capitol Hill. It’s been brought on by both sides.

Republicans who run the House of Representatives dislike Barack Obama for a lengthy list of reasons. Most of it is because of policy reasons. Some of it, though, seems to go beyond what most of us considerable to be reasonable. A handful of GOP lawmakers have gone to extreme lengths to insult the president, question his integrity, his qualifications for office, you name it.

Shall we recall, also, that the leading Senate Republican declared during Barack Obama’s first year in office that his “No. 1 goal is to make Obama a one-term president”? Mitch McConnell failed in that quest, as the president won re-election.

OK, there’s where Capitol Hill is to blame.

President Obama did not bother to learn the fine art of legislating during his brief time in the Senate. Therefore, he entered the White House believing in his way only. He hasn’t developed the kind of personal relationships presidents need when the chips are down.

As some of my veteran Texas political observer friends have reminded me over the years, Barack Obama needs a healthy dose of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a product of the Senate. He knew how to legislate. He knew how to cajole, persuade, threaten, compromise, surrender — all at the same time. He took those skills to the White House when he became president on Nov. 22, 1963.

Had the current president developed better relationships with Congress, he wouldn’t find himself being pounded incessantly now over this latest matter — the alleged failure to consult fully with Congress before agreeing to the release of the bad guys from Gitmo in exchange for Bergdahl’s freedom.

Whose fault is all this?

From my perspective — and recognizing my own bias — I would have to lay the bulk of the blame here on Congress. The leadership there has been bereft of ideas of their own. They’ve been intent on undoing the president’s agenda at every possible turn. From health care, to environmental policy and lately — and this one just slays me — to rolling back the first lady’s guidelines on serving healthy lunches to our school children attending public schools, congressional Republicans have dug in their heels.

None of that excuses the president’s refusal to build better relationships, but in my mind it suggests that Barack Obama has grown tired of fighting over every single issue that needs to be resolved.

Bergdahl’s release needed to occur. It came after some tough decision-making at the White House. It has enraged members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.

Should we take their outrage seriously? Sure. But it doesn’t mean that Planet Earth will spin off its axis if they don’t get their way in this latest public quarrel.

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Here comes the sun … power

President Obama has decided to crack down on carbon dioxide emissions produced by power-generating plants.

He has implemented federal environmental rules requiring a 30 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. Is the president the enemy of the coal industry, which produces a lot of energy to fuel these plants? Not according to Bloomberg View, which reports that the solar industry is the biggest threat to the fossil fuel industry.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-04/obama-isn-t-killing-power-plants-the-sun-is

I’ve read the article attached here and it brings to mind something I’ve wondered for almost the entire time I’ve lived in West Texas: Why isn’t solar energy more prevalent here?

I think I know one reason: natural gas. We have lots of natural gas here and it remains a large employer and is quite important to the electricity-generation grid. There’s little incentive, therefore, to move away from natural gas.

West Texas is producing a lot more wind energy now than when we moved here in early 1995. Indeed, Texas and California are the two top alternative-energy producing states in the country — a fact that I’m sure drives the governors of both states, Democrat Jerry Brown of California and Republican Rick Perry of Texas stark-raving mad.

West Texas also has a large amount of sunshine. The Panhandle has more than 300 days of sunshine annually. We can erect a lot of solar panels on new home construction here and have them heat and cool houses while using less fossil fuel that has limits on its supply.

As Carl Pope, a Sierra Club activist, writes for Bloomberg View: “Solar panels — whether utility scale or residential rooftop — generate maximum power on exactly those hot afternoons when demand peaks. What’s more, they do so at no marginal cost; the sun is free. This reduces reliance on peakers, causing prices to fall across the board, including for customers without solar power.”

It’s an interesting concept that ought to find its way to West Texas … eventually.

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Headlines keep changing rapidly

It occurs to me that our collective attention keeps getting diverted from crisis to crisis — and few of us talk openly about the crisis that passes from our view.

* Remember the Syrian civil war? We were going to bomb Syria for using chemical weapons on civilians. Then we backed off. The Russians entered the picture and helped broker a deal to get rid of the weapons.

* A Boeing 777 disappeared en route from Malaysia to China. It apparently crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Search teams from several countries are looking for the wreckage that contains 239 passengers and crew. To date, nothing’s been found.

* Then came Ukraine. The Russians entered the picture there, too. Ukraine ousted its pro-Russian president, who fled to Russia. The Russians essentially annexed Crimea, moved a lot of troops to the Ukraine border, then backed off after the Ukrainians elected a news president who is acceptable to Moscow.

* A Nigerian terrorist group — Boko Haram — kidnapped about 300 girls and is holding them captive somewhere. World opinion erupted and the demands came out for the international community to do all it can to rescue those young women.

* Americans got caught up in the Benghazi story yet again. The House of Representatives formed a select committee to examine the Benghazi attack one more time. Maybe we’ll see the end of this probe. Then again, maybe not until after the 2016 presidential election that’s likely to feature one Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was secretary of state when the U.S. consulate was attacked in September 2012.

* The Veterans Administration took the headlines away from Benghazi with reports of veterans dying while awaiting health care in Arizona. Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned and a thorough review is under way to find a cure for what ails the massive federal agency.

* Taliban militants released Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and the questions about his release and the terms that brought it about have created the latest headline grabber.

These sequences keep building on themselves. Our attention is riveted on these storied and then it’s diverted from one “crisis of the moment” to the next one.

Is it any wonder why Barack Obama’s hair has gotten so gray?

Hey, what’s happening with Syria these days?

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What if we'd left Bergdahl behind?

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As the feeding frenzy continues over the release of a one-time prisoner of war in Afghanistan, a lot of key questions have arisen.

I’ve covered some of them already in this blog. Another one has popped up.

What would the reaction have been had the United States — knowing the history of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s views on the Afghan War and perhaps suspecting he had left his post, as has been alleged — left him behind?

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/208213-reid-charges-gop-with-hypocrisy-on-bergdahl

The demands for answers have been loud, clear and largely justified.

Bergdahl was released by his Taliban captors after he’d been held for five years. In exchange, we released five high-ranking Taliban thugs from Gitmo on the condition they be restricted from traveling out of Qatar for a year. After that, well, it’s anyone’s guess, I suppose.

Bergdahl reportedly opposed our Afghan War effort. He said so in emails back home. Those views allegedly were known by the Army. We went after him anyway. President Obama said Americans “don’t leave soldiers behind” in war.

What we gave up to get him and the allegations that he “deserted” his comrades have raised a huge uproar.

Some of my very own friends here in the Texas Panhandle have called Bergdahl a traitor. They want him punished, thinking they know all the facts already. One fellow even said we ought to send him back to his captors.

Whatever.

Still, the question remains: What would be the tone of the criticism if we’d turned our backs on a soldier who some Americans already believe committed an act of treason? Would those people who today are critical of the recovery effort applaud an abandonment?

My strong suspicion is that they would be screaming themselves hoarse at the notion that the United States actually would leave one of our warriors behind, in the hands of a ruthless enemy.

Perhaps that takes us directly into the excruciating decision made at the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Council and the Oval Office itself.

It hardly, therefore, seems fair for peanut-gallery pundits to draw premature conclusions about a delicate matter about which they know next to nothing.

Yes, there are many questions to answer. How about first getting those answers?

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Here comes 'impeachment' talk

Wait for it. Here it comes. Are you ready for it?

Some talking heads in both the left- and right-wing media are talking about impeachment as it regards the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Oh … brother.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/208264-gop-senator-obama-faces-impeachment-push-if-more-prisoners-leave-gitmo

Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who knows a thing or two about impeaching a president of the United States — now warns that President Obama could face impeachment if he releases any more prisoners from Guantanamo Bay without consulting first with Congress.

The United States turned over five Taliban detainees in exchange for Bergdahl. The exchange reportedly took place without the White House advising Congress of it in advance, under federal law. Republicans are outraged — outraged, I tell you — that they weren’t so advised.

The White House has apologized for what it calls an “oversight.” That hasn’t stopped the uproar.

Sen. Graham — himself an Air Force reserve lawyer — once helped prosecute President Clinton during the 42nd president’s 1998 impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. The Senate acquitted the president and Republicans ended up paying dearly for it politically at the next election.

Some left-wing media pundits — notably MSNBC’s Ed Schultz — believe Republicans are waiting for the results of this year’s mid-term election before commencing impeachment proceedings against Barack Obama. The idea, according to Schultz, is that the GOP could gain control of the Senate and tighten their grip on the House, particularly with tea party Republicans winning elections across the country.

I’m hoping Schultz is just hyperventilating and will calm down once he catches his breath.

We’ll need to get some answers to questions about Bergdahl’s release and, just as importantly, his capture five years ago. Was he AWOL? Did he abandon his post? If he did walk away, should the Army court-martial him? Let’s sort all that out first.

As for the release, the president and the Pentagon brass were determined not to leave an American behind once we leave the Afghanistan battlefield. Bowe Bergdahl was the lone U.S. service member being held captive. The brass felt it was worth it to exchange five Taliban officers for Bergdahl.

Did they do it by the book? That, too, remains to be determined definitively.

Good grief. Let’s can this impeachment talk until we get all the facts on the table.