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Barack Obama Misfires at West Point
05/29/14
Jacob Heilbrunn
Grand Strategy, United States
"Obama has made clear what he is against. But he has not explained what he is for."
President
Obama’s speech today at West Point could hardly contrast more starkly
with George W. Bush’s at West Point on June 1, 2002. After 9/11 Bush
announced that America needed to go on the offensive. Containment was
passé, old school, ready to be put out to pasture. He was offering the
headier brew of preemptive action. Bush announced, “Deterrence, the
promise of massive retaliation against nations, means nothing against
shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend.
Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of
mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly
provide them to terrorist allies.”
Bush’s claims were bogus and set the course for the Iraq War, a conflict that has inflicted severe damage upon American national security, both by the sheer human and financial cost of the war as well as by the inadvertent fomenting of terrorism across the Middle East. The upheaval in Syria, where jihadist groups are vying with each other for supremacy, is a direct result of the conflict in Iraq.
Now, over a decade later, Obama announced a very different stance, one that has incurred the ire of GOP Senators such as John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, and Lindsey Graham who jointly declared that Obama's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by 2016 is a "monumental mistake and a triumph of politics over strategy." Obama, by contrast, said in his commence speech at West Point: "A strategy that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks is naïve and unsustainable." The blowtorch approach of the Bush administration is out. A more discriminating approach is in in. Wars of choice are not something Washington should promiscuously choose. One reason is that the U.S. does not need to adopt a siege mentality: claims that America is headed for the skids, he said, are bunk. The threats that the U.S. faces are manageable, not overwhelming:
Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/obamas-west-point-speech-10552
Bush’s claims were bogus and set the course for the Iraq War, a conflict that has inflicted severe damage upon American national security, both by the sheer human and financial cost of the war as well as by the inadvertent fomenting of terrorism across the Middle East. The upheaval in Syria, where jihadist groups are vying with each other for supremacy, is a direct result of the conflict in Iraq.
Now, over a decade later, Obama announced a very different stance, one that has incurred the ire of GOP Senators such as John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, and Lindsey Graham who jointly declared that Obama's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by 2016 is a "monumental mistake and a triumph of politics over strategy." Obama, by contrast, said in his commence speech at West Point: "A strategy that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks is naïve and unsustainable." The blowtorch approach of the Bush administration is out. A more discriminating approach is in in. Wars of choice are not something Washington should promiscuously choose. One reason is that the U.S. does not need to adopt a siege mentality: claims that America is headed for the skids, he said, are bunk. The threats that the U.S. faces are manageable, not overwhelming:
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