Weak willed pundits like Robert Sheer who accuse Obama for doing the very things they elected him to do, are missing the point of his focused, no feet on the ground, battle with the world’s terrorists. You can’t have it both ways, Bob. Either you have to fight the terrorists wherever they are or you have to fight them here by eroding the liberties we have fought for since this country began. Either you spy on patriotic American citizens by listening in to their conversations, intercepting their email and arresting & holding them without benefit of our protective laws or you bomb the hell out of terrorists where they live.
Sheer is dead wrong, when he rails against Obama for shouldering the awful decisions of command. Would he rather have a cowardly George Bush allocating those decisions to his bloodthirsty hit men, Rumsfeld, Rove and Cheney?
As for his accusation that the president kills children too, when he sends a drone to kill a terrorist leader, whose fault is that? Brave men, throughout history have sent heir families out of harms way instead of surrounding themselves with them, like some kind of human shield. The cowardly terrorists are, themselves, responsible for the deaths of their families. It is they, not Obama who has put these women and children in the line of fire. Look at bin Laden who surrounded himself with wives and kids, knowing that he was a target but not caring what might happen to his family. He is typical of the degenerate slime that Obama is killing to protect us.
As for the constant babbling about drones, why is this even a consideration? There is no difference between a drone and a manned aircraft when you are lying dead in the rubble. When you are the bomber, as we are, the difference is huge, in terms of manpower exposed to danger and cost of equipment. We now have the capacity to do pinpoint bombing with both drones and manned aircraft. The decision should be made according to our needs, not those of the terrorists we are trying to kill. If they don’t want their women and children to get hurt they should not be using them as shields. Anyone, with any sense of honor, understands that.
What Obama has been doing, and it is no easy job, is trying to clean up the mess left by eight years of Republican policies. I have already dealt extensively with the economic mess, Bush/Cheney left behind but here I’m speaking about the international mess. Two wars, one started over oil and the other by stupidity were only part of the Bush legacy. It’s not only the wars, but the destruction of our diplomatic ties with most of our allies and the arrogant, blundering way in which Bush/Cheney went about dealing with most of the rest of the world.
This is no longer a colonial world, where wars are started, for the most past, because countries want spoils. The Roman Empire, the Empire of Genghis Khan and the British Raj the three greatest empires in the history of the world, were created because of a desire to acquire more. There were no philosophical, political or ideological forces at work in the construction of these empires. Their construction was built on the search for treasure and resources without the bother of trade. Whether or not we want to face it that is still the modus operandi of the supposedly civilized world. The only difference between then and now is that, starting with the British Raj, the push came, not from Kings but corporations. It’s still corporations and if you don’t get that, you’re not paying attention.
This is not a diatribe against corporations, this is a rant against them controlling our foreign policy because given a potential for profit and a move that will benefit the United States, they will choose profit every time and that’s wrong and if you don’t believe that’s wrong then you aren’t a patriot, you’re just a greedy pig looking for a higher rate of return.
Every war in which we are involved, and that even includes the ones that look like they are for humanitarian purposes, has a spoils motivation. Some of the wars were started locally for religious, ideological or political purposes, but our involvement in them and which side we are on, is universally dictated by what it can do for our corporate hierarchy. Before you even get to the Middle East and Africa just look at Central and South America. Every decision on whom to back in Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina and the rest was based, not on the good of those people, but on our corporate interests, all of which, backed viscous dictators who knew how to keep the workers in line.
This is now true in the Middle East where the lure of oil gleams through the smoke from burning civilizations, and even more so in Africa where natural resources, not human well being, are the currency of our interest. But we can acquire these things without starting or backing wars. There is still, except if you are a Republican congressmen, a thing called negotiation. Even the dictators of places where there are things we want would rather negotiate than take a chance on losing their kingdoms in a war.
Obama has closed down the war in Iraq. There are many who say he has done it prematurely but there is really no other end to that disaster than just getting out. Yes, we have left a lot of people in a lurch there, but that was an inevitability the second George Bush got us in thee. If we continued the war for another twenty years, nothing would change, we would still be leaving a lot of people in a lurch and we would have wasted additional hundreds of thousand of American lives and trillions of dollars of taxpayers money.
Massive invasions are no longer the way to fight wars. We have finally developed the technology to fight them on the basis in which they are being waged and Obama has chosen to stand up, like a man, and take the responsibility for what happens when he is defending his country. That’s his job. The buck stops with him. That’s what a man does. It’s not what George Bush did. From what he, himself, has said, it’s not what Mitt Romney would do.