Op Ed: Obama’s Wars

By IAN SCOTT WILSON

Barrack Hussein Obama is the only President of these United States to have the distinction of presiding over our nation while it was at war during the entire length of his presidency. He was at war longer than any other President. Naturally, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize during the first year of his first term. Boggling? Of course not. He can do no wrong. One of the reasons for his nomination for the prize, it was claimed, was because he showed that he may “foster a new climate in international relations.” Good. I would like a Grammy for that fire album I’m dropping sometime! What we weren’t told was that this new climate that he was going to engineer was going to be a bad one. Obama has been a disaster for foreign policy.

I was present at the 2008 Take Back America conference in the Capital when, then Senator, Obama promised to end the wars in the Middle East “Not a year from now. Not a month from now. But now!” That didn’t happen. As much as one side wants to blame the other, or previous administrations, President Obama did have choices he could have made, and his choices were almost never a reflection of his 2008 promise. Look at the quick rundown of his administration’s foreign entanglements and debacles: He pulled out of Iraq, leaving the vacuum that the Islamic State filled; He added troops to Afghanistan (today, the Taliban controls more territory in Afghanistan than it did in 2001, when George W. Bush overthrew them); He amped up drone use to ten times that of Bush (The Atlantic reports that nearly 90% of drone strikes kill civilians); He approved military action in Syria, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and the other countries already listed; In true hypocritical Woodrow Wilson fashion, he promised in 2011 (before the reelection) that all our boys in Iraq would be home by the holidays, and then sent more in (that is a promise he has made on multiple occasions in reference to multiple countries).

But for a President always at war, he did a pretty terrible job of winning any of the wars. Bush, though I have no love for the man, overthrew Saddam Hussein and won the war in Iraq. It was only after we won that things went downhill because of the Bush administration’s mismanagement during the occupation. What has Obama won (besides the prize for peace)? Obama won his first Grammy in 2006. Go figure.