Posted: Jun 23, 2019 12:29 pm
Mike_L wrote:
In light of the above, there are two possibilities...
* the war-shy Obama of 2008 was a lying sociopath.
* Obama really meant to limit US global aggression, but upon arrival in office found that he had limited (or zero) influence to change a foreign policy course that had been set decades earlier.
There is another possibility, and it's the old much bandied quotation which apparently everyone ever said - no plan survives contact with the enemy.
What I mean by this is that you can't, as the leader of a nation, have an absolute policy never to get engaged in any war, because that's really just asking for those hostile to you to ramp up their efforts. You can't predict everything that will happen in advance, but will need to respond to some of the things that happen which were outside of your control. An example of this is the events in Yemen, while not an argument that what the US is doing there is effective or desirable, not doing anything is still doing something when it comes to leaving one population to murder another.
I've no doubt there are career neocons at all levels of any US administration, but the buck still stops with the Commander in Chief - none of them can drop bombs, fire rockets or send fleets or troops to any part of the world without the President's say so. Thus while I don't doubt that Bolton is a total fuckwad whose passing of mortal restraints will result in a measurably better world, he was still appointed by Trump, still needs Trump's approval to do anything, and it was Trump's say-so which led to this situation, so the notion that Trump's the good guy riding in with the cavalry at the 11th hour to save the US and Iran from conflict is just not something I can swallow. Like much of Fox news propaganda.