Obama Breaks Yet Another Promise

President Obama has spent nearly eight years bumbling his foreign policy and breaking promises, failing to stem the tide of war. And all that came after winning a Nobel Peace Prize before he even settled into his chair behind the great Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

Should she win the presidency, Hillary Clinton will inherit from the Great Peacemaker no less than three wars that Obama neglected to finish — Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war against ISIS (a war which he himself created). The bad news for America — and the men and women of our armed forces — is that her record suggests she is both trigger happy and just as much a bumbler as her mentor.

One of the most common refrains in support of Clinton’s candidacy against Donald Trump is that she has experience.

One of the most common refrains in support of Clinton’s candidacy against Donald Trump is that she has experience. Certainly she does, but what’s left out is that her experience is the contribution she made as secretary of state to the president’s incompetence and dissimulation. And much incompetence and dissimulation there has been.

After Vietnam, the United States supposedly learned the lesson that wars are to be fought relentlessly and to the point of unconditional surrender from your opponent, which means total victory for America — or don’t fight at all. Obama, having promised to end both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars while suggesting the battle against terror was nearly over, failed to comprehend that simple rule. Instead, he has made incrementalism and half-hearted efforts the watchword of his foreign policy, failing to either win these wars or permanently disengage.

Obama not only made false promises — he campaigned on them. “President Obama responsibly ended the war in Iraq and will end the war in Afghanistan in 2014,” stated the platform on barackobama.com, the Obama campaign website. Instead, Obama strode into the Roosevelt Room on Wednesday and announced that 8,400 troops would remain in Afghanistan, since the Taliban was showing more pluck than Obama cared to consider when his re-election was a stake.

On October 11, 2011, in preparation for the campaign season, Obama made a remarkable series of promises and predictions he failed to keep. The speech was to announce that Americans would be returning from Iraq in glorious triumph, the job all finished.

“As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end — for the sake of our national security and to strengthen American leadership around the world,” he said. “After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011.

“Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq — tens of thousands of them — will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home. The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

Instead, local and foreign ISIS fighters have set up shop and are destabilizing Libya as well.

Of course, it didn’t end. The United States is back there today to the tune of about 3,000 troops and, despite subsequent Obama promises, with their “boots on the ground” and well in harm’s way. Oh, and America’s failure to finish the job led to the creation of ISIS.

Remarkably, in the very same speech, Obama declared the chimes of freedom tunefully clanking together in Libya. “Yesterday marked the definitive end of the Qaddafi regime in Libya,” he said. “And there, too, our military played a critical role in shaping a situation on the ground in which the Libyan people can build their own future.”

Instead, local and foreign ISIS fighters have set up shop and are destabilizing Libya as well.

Obama concluded this remarkably deceptive and un-prescient speech by asserting that the War on Terror was all but wrapped up, and the world was entering a new era of peace, love, and understanding.

“And finally, I would note that the end of war in Iraq reflects a larger transition,” he said. “The tide of war is receding. The draw-down in Iraq allowed us to refocus our fight against al-Qaeda and achieve major victories against its leadership — including Osama bin Laden.”

Just ask the families of the murdered from San Bernardino to Orlando to Paris, from Brussels to Saudi Arabia, just how victorious Obama has been against terrorism.

Well, just ask the families of the murdered from San Bernardino to Orlando to Paris, from Brussels to Saudi Arabia, just how victorious Obama has been against terrorism.

And then of course there is the perennially broken promise to close Guantanamo Bay, which Obama is rushing to try to fulfill even if it means creating a worldwide farm team for ISIS to draw from.

Clinton is known for being able to point to precious few achievements from her tenure as secretary of state. But one of them was her advocacy inside the administration for ousting Muammar Qaddafi, perhaps the worst foreign policy mistake of the Obama administration — and of any U.S. president to date.

Reports suggest Clinton is ready to unveil her inner hawk once she has fooled Bernie Sanders’ pacifist supporters and made herself president.

“Throughout her career she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are more aggressive than those of President Obama — and most Democrats,” The New York Times wrote in April in an article titled, “How Hillary became a hawk.”

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Meantime, Politico reports that the Republican foreign policy Establishment, which brought you incompetently waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is flocking to Hillary instead of Trump.

One may or may not like it that Clinton is a closet neocon. But her judgment is provably flawed, whether on issues related to the conduct of foreign policy or practically anything else. And that could mean American troops sent to fight bad guys in half-baked schemes to extend American influence or rid the world of some tyrant whose tyranny, awful as it may be, is none of our damned business.

Obama will hand off to her three limited wars, which will serve as training wheels for God-knows-what major conflagration Clinton will immerse the United States in should she seize the post of commander-in-chief.