The Worst Commander-in-Chief
An objective ranking of President Obama’s eight years in the White House will not be available for 50 years. A half century will be required for the historians being born today to mature without the propaganda hype, both pro and con, influencing their study of the President’s record.
When he took office on January 20, 2009, he was taking the reigns of the most powerful nation on earth that was in the midst of world-wide war. All of his predecessors had been respected as leaders of the free world.
Naively believing that all heads of state were peace lovers, he proclaimed, in effect, “There will be peace on earth, because I say so.”
He seems to be clueless of the history of men who dream of world domination. Dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, Putin, Shah Ayatollah Khomeini, and many more.
His approach to the current crop of those seeking world domination is to have Secretary of State Clinton push the “reset button” with her Russian counter part and invite Putin to be the leader of intervention in Syria.
Simultaneously, he negotiates a pact with the Ayatollah that insures Iran’s access to nuclear material. Theoretically, there will not be enough of that material for nuclear missiles with which to wipe out Israel and the U.S. for ten years, but there would be enough for terrorists working at the Ayatollah’s direction to make a suitcase bomb with devastating destructive power.
With the reset button in play and Iran playing with nuclear material, Putin says, “I want to resurrect the USSR. I need more territory for that, so I’ll start by annexing the Crimea and maybe part of Ukraine.”
Obama’s response was, “OK, fine. Just as Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was satisfied that all Hitler wanted was just a bit of Czechoslovakia, I’m sure that Crimea is all you want. Because we are buddies. Right?”
By contrast, as soon as Putin’s intentions became clear, a real Commander-in-Chief would have been on the phone with Ukraine’s President Poroshenko with a proposal to have joint military exercises in the Crimea. The personnel of a U.S. Airborne division could have been in place in Crimea within weeks with any necessary heavy equipment to arrive in due course.
After the “exercise,” some U.S. personnel could just happen to stay in place with their counterparts in Ukraine. This would have been a minimal show of force by the world’s former super power, but it would have provided a trip wire that Putin probably would not want to test.
That would have been like stationing the U.S. Army’s 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Germany’s Fulda Gap for 40 years. There is no way that small unit could have stopped an East German or Russian invasion of West Germany through that natural invasion route. It’s presense, though, was a reminder that the U.S. carried a big stick like the one mentioned by President Teddy Roosevelt and was prepared to use it.
The most serious failing of President Obama as a Commander-in-Chief, however, is his failure to accept that we are in a world-wide war with an identifiable enemy. Every commercial airport in the world is a battlefield in that war.
There are more individuals in those long, slow moving lines in airports than ever filled the trenches of WWI or the fox holes of WWII. Those crawling lines are defenses against an enemy intent on killing as many “infidels” as possible with one powerful bomb.
As those lines grow ever longer and slower, our Commander-in-Chief, who, by the way, never has to shuffle along in one of them, says, “Not to worry. We have no enemy who can be identified as such and we are taking out some leaders of some unidentifiable work place terrorists with a drone strike every now and then. My friends Vladimir Putin of Russia and the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran will take care of the other bad boys for us. Just leave me alone with all this war stuff, because I told you there would be peace!”
So here’s the perspective.
Any ranking of Barack Obama above the bottom rung of the Commander-in-Chief ladder would have to be based on a complete ignorance of history and national defense strategy.
The really bad news, though, is that it appears that there will be no chance of a step up to a higher rung with either of the current presumptive nominees for President.
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