Andrew J. Bacevich retired from the U.S. Army as a colonel in the early 1990s. His son, 1st Lieutenant Andrew John Bacevich Jr., was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq in 2007. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His latest book is Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country. He writes
Obama Is Picking Targets in Iraq and Syria While Missing the Point. An excerpt:
Destroying what Obama calls the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant won’t create an effective and legitimate Iraqi state. It won’t restore the possibility of a democratic Egypt. It won’t dissuade Saudi Arabia from funding jihadists. It won’t pull Libya back from the brink of anarchy. It won’t end the Syrian civil war. It won’t bring peace and harmony to Somalia and Yemen. It won’t persuade the Taliban to lay down their arms in Afghanistan. It won’t end the perpetual crisis of Pakistan. It certainly won’t resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
All the military power in the world won’t solve those problems. Obama knows that. Yet he is allowing himself to be drawn back into the very war that he once correctly denounced as stupid and unnecessary — mostly because he and his advisers don’t know what else to do. Bombing has become his administration’s default option.
Rudderless and without a compass, the American ship of state continues to drift, guns blazing.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Obama ratchets up his health care reform pitch:
The scariest thing in the health care reform debate is not fictitious death panels. It's the reality of the current system's denial of care, spiraling expenses and future projections for even worse and more expensive care in the future. And President Obama hammered home the bleak reality in this morning's weekly address, in which he cited a brand new Treasury report with some startling statistics:
...we can expect that about half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next ten years. If you’re under the age of 21 today, chances are more than half that you’ll find yourself uninsured at some point in that time. And more than one-third of Americans will go without coverage for longer than one year.
I refuse to allow that future to happen. In the United States of America, no one should have to worry that they’ll go without health insurance – not for one year, not for one month, not for one day. And once I sign my health reform plan into law—they won’t. |
Note the president's ownership now of the issue—my health reform plan— he refers to "my plan" no less than four times in today's earnest pitch. It's surely no coincidence that this, his first weekly talk after his successful address to Congress on the topic, frames the issue as his own. From his rhetoric, it appears he's more than willing to lead on it now. |
Tweet of the Day
“@joshtpm: Man Reportedly Fired From Job After Telling ABC He Saw Palin Family Brawl"
The first rule of Palin Fight Club...
— @Rschooley
On
today's "classic" Kagro in the Morning show, it's the 9/12/13 episode. After a little multiculturalism chit-chat,
Greg Dworkin gave us his round-up, including the Putin op-ed in the
NYT, the CO recalls, and Republican shutdown strategery & the Hastert Rule. A brief look at this intriguing find, "Marissa Mayer: 'It's Treason' For Yahoo To Disobey The NSA." Hmm!
Salon's "The 1 percent's Ivy League loophole." And a return to and longer look at "How the cult of shareholder value wrecked American business." We tried to squeeze
Armando in for a bit, but the NSA wasn't having it.
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