Asia Times: Presidential folly persists in Obama By Andrew J Bacevich

[PurityOfEssence]

Very interesting article about our seemingly unbreakable penchant for military solutions in the Middle East.

Here's a taste:

"In truth, to ascribe a single governing purpose or rationale to any large-scale foreign policy initiative is to engage in willful distortion."

Asia Times

[pscot]

1. "A failure of imagination

as well as courage."

[PurityOfEssence]

2. In a way, he is being held to high standards, but then, he also played that for all it's worth

If he hadn't claimed to be a new kind of politician and above all of these grubby machinations, he wouldn't take the hit so much for them.

Regardless how we get poo-poohed for thinking he was a "pacifist", since he pointed out that he'd prosecute the Afghanistan War more when running, he played along with the mistaken impressions and made plenty of hay from them.

This particular episode does not pass any sniff test: there were protests, but not huge or debilitating ones, and there were no massacres or anything that would really lead an impartial observer to believe there would be. On the other hand, there WERE oil interests that were pissed off at his threats of nationalization and his actual reduction of percentage taken by the the foreign companies--especially France's "Total"--and serious hopes of getting a better deal. Once the French recognized the Rebel Government, though, any sensible observer should have seen that the jig was up.

The most prescient of the lines is the snarkily apt one of: "For all sorts of reasons, the expectations raised by Barack Obama's arrival in the Oval Office were especially high. Americans weren't the only ones affected. How else to explain the Nobel Committee's decision to honor the new president by transforming its Peace Prize into a Prize Anticipating Peace..."

This is an oil war. There was no real threat of massacre, and the protests were not horrific by any stretch of the imagination. Watching the coverage closely just underlines how little material they had to try to make it look like a holocaust, as people shrieked the inaccurate word "genocide" day and night. We were had.

[pscot]

3. I would have thought that Peace prize

carried some responsibilites with it. I wonder what the Nobel committee members are thinking now.

[PurityOfEssence]

4. Like many others, they're fighting that nagging feeling that they might have been wrong

while knowing that he's the only game in town.