With all due respect to Cactus Flower, we have some problems with this article!
To think that in any way one can compare Barack Obama to Richard Nixon is one of the greatest stretches of an immense imagination that we have ever read.
Lets look at a few things:
1. The United States Congress refused to appropriate the funds to close Guantanamo Bay after Obama requested them to close the place in 2009! Obama had little choice to keep the facility operating in the face of this obstacle. It needs to be recalled that the president wanted to transfer the inmates at the Cuban facility to a facility in Illinois, in the United States.
2. Many of the individuals currently incarcerated there are terrorists who have vowed to die for their cause. Dying of starvation is simply one more way of achieving that end. These people are public relations experts!
3. If Obama repatriates many of these individuals currently held at Guantanamo to their countries of origin, they will be immediately imprisoned and tortured, then killed by the countries that they would be returned to. When Obama says that he wants to keep them alive, that is exactly what he is referring to.
4. In regard to drone strikes, there has been much written by the left as to the efficacy of this sort of event. It should be pointed out that the people of these nations where these strikes are being carried out are being used as human shields in an attempt to prevent these strikes from occurring. It should also be pointed out that if these people in these countries want to stop these drone strikes then they need to rise up and throw these terrorists groups out of their nations and localities instead of blaming the United States for protecting its own interests. Our only other choice is to risk the lives of American special forces, which cannot be done when many of these strikes are events of opportunity that a call for special forces cannot deal with quickly enough.
5. President Obama came into office in 2009 with a great deal of idealism not born out in subsequent years by what he has seen from these groups who would do the United States harm. One could compare that experience with that he has faced with the neocons republicans whom he tried to work with for a very long time despite a hatred for him that might rival that of the radical islamists. The intelligence that he has received and what he has seen from sources that David Bromwich and his ilk have no access to at all has led him to follow the actions that he has taken to protect this nation. Lest we forget that out of the nation of Afghanistan came the attack on a clear September day that killed over three thousand Americans on the East coast of the United States. Let us also not forget that Osama bin Laden chose death over capture in the raid that ended with his death. Let us also not forget that there have been numerous attempts to blow up American aircraft and other facilities over the years since 9-11. We are not just picking people out of thin air to kill. These people and those around them know what they have been up to just as well as we have. We cannot emphasis enough the fact that these terrorists are using civilians as human shields.
6. Mr. Bromwich would have us believe in his article that Mr. Obama was solely responsible for the deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, placing their numbers at 225,000 over the years. Mr. Bromwich has absolutely no documentation to back up those figures at all which is why he lumped them all together and came up with this outlandish figure in order to try to gain support for his questionable argument. Most of these people died during the regime of George W. Bush which Bromwich likes to link to Obama just as well as he has done in other articles at the Huffington Post.
7. Mr. Bromwich lists Libya as one of the nations that Obama interfered with, not bothering to tell us that if the United States had not gone in with air strikes with NATO, there would have been a blood bath on the ground in Libya similar to what we are currently seeing in Syria, a place Obama is staying out of due to the inability to determine just who our future enemies might be among the rebels fighting Assad. Mr. Obama has stated that the despots in these countries must go but we do not want to replace one problem with what might be an even more serious one. Many have learned from the Bush error in Iraq when he deposed Saddam and now we question if Iran is not in defacto control of that nation that once provided a counter to their ambitions.
8. In regards to Pakistan. Bromwich does correctly point out that there are around one hundred nuclear weapons in that nation and we should do everything in our power to be sure that Pakistan does not fall into the hands of the radicals among the Islamists. Mr. Obama could have done a drone strike in Pakistan to kill bin Laden but he instead chose to use special forces to prove to the world that we had indeed accomplished a goal that had been at the top of the nations list since September eleventh, 2001. It should also be pointed out that if the United States had notified Pakistan of its intentions to strike bin Laden in advance, persons inside of the Pakistani government would likely have notified bin Laden in advance and he would have gotten away. Mr. Bromwich uses statistics to try to prove his case in Pakistan for their American hatred but he neglects to mention that the vast majority of these drone strikes have occurred out in the tribal regions of that nation, where it has little or no control over the situation. He also neglects to mention that Pakistan is a nation of great passions and many great hates. Just look at their relations with their neighbor India.
We found this piece to be a character assassination piece by a person who, by his credentials, would not seem to have much expertise in what he is trying to put forth. We have looked at some of Bromwich’s prior work and it is not particularly sympathetic to president Obama. However, this reference to Richard Nixon seems to be the most radical thing he has done thus far. It has been documented that Richard Nixon was a very paranoid personality and trying to link a very careful and cautious Obama to that type of person is very insulting indeed. Barack Obama keeps growing and learning during his time in office while all Richard Nixon did was learn to destroy his presidency.
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
| 