Obama Is A Peanut Farm Away from Carter

[Cyclotron]

Yeah, I'm by no means arguing the reverse of DanS. I, like you, don't think the recession is the fault of any president; it's probably out of our collective hands entirely. I don't think the failure to head off 9/11 was "100%" Bush's fault; maybe nobody could have stopped it given the sorry state of our intelligence agencies.

Only hacks are going to look at 9/11 and the Bush era recession and say "yep, Clinton's fault, 100%" like DanS does. He seems to think that everyone is a hack like him and that Bush's legacy will be largely positive as a result. He sets the bar low for Bush, claiming that the fact that no more major terrorist attacks happened will be taken as a positive aspect of his administration (wasn't 9/11 enough?), and sets it impossibly high for Clinton, blaming things on his administration that happened years later.

[Darius871]

I'm in total agreement on the economy, but as much as I'd like to blame Bush for anti-terrorism failures allowing 9/11 to happen, Clinton's dereliction was so egregious that I don't find even a 100% apportionment all that unfair. I don't have time to get dragged into a lengthy discussion on this, but I'd say Michael Scheuer's expert opinion sums it up nicely, keeping in mind that he's no friend of the Bush Administration by any stretch of the imagination:

"Clarke's book [Against All Enemies] is also a crucial complement to the September 11 panel's failure to condemn Mr. Clinton's failure to capture or kill bin Laden on any of the eight to 10 chances afforded by CIA reporting. Mr. Clarke never mentions that President Bush had no chances to kill bin Laden before September 11 and leaves readers with the false impression that he, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, did their best to end the bin Laden threat. That trio, in my view, abetted al Qaeda, and if the September 11 families were smart they would focus on the dereliction of Dick [Clarke], Bill [Clinton] and Sandy [Berger] and not the antics of convicted September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui."[6]

WALLACE: Mr. Scheuer, as the man in charge of what was called "Alec Station," the CIA unit in charge of hunting down Usama bin Laden, you say the Clinton administration missed at least 10 chances to get him. I don't want to go into all 10, but what was the problem?

FORMER CIA UNIT CHIEF MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well, the president is correct, in that he got - President Clinton is correct that he got closer than anyone, but, of course, he always refused to pull the trigger. And in addition, we were never authorized, while I was the chief of operations, to kill Usama bin Laden. In fact, Mr. Richard Clarke definitely told us we had no authorization to kill bin Laden.

Why they didn't shoot, of course, is, at least from Mr. Tenet's viewpoint it was because one time they were afraid to have shrapnel hit a mosque when they killed bin Laden. And two other times I think they were afraid they actually would have to do something, so they warned the emirates on one occasion, the princes from the United Arab Emirates, to move so we couldn't attack bin Laden.

WALLACE: They were on a hunting trip with bin Laden.

SCHEUER: Yes, sir. And Richard Clarke called the emirates and warned them that they should get out of that area, which cost us the chance to kill him.

WALLACE: In your opinion, as somebody who was up close and personal, why didn't the Clinton administration go after Al Qaeda after the USS Cole?

SCHEUER: Mr. Wallace, my opinion is not all that important. I went to a little Jesuit school in Buffalo called Canisius, and the priests taught us never to lie, but if you had to lie, never lie about facts. Mr. Richard Clarke, Mr. Sandy Berger, President Clinton are lying about the opportunities they had to kill Usama bin Laden. That's the plain truth, the exact truth.

Men and women at the CIA risked their lives to provide occasions to kill a man we knew had declared war and had attacked America four or five times before 1998. We had plans that had been approved by the Joint Operations Command at Fort Bragg. We had opportunities, many opportunities to kill him.

But that's the president's decision. That's absolutely the case. It's not a simple, dumb bureaucrat like me; that's not my decision. It's his. But for him to get on the television and say to the American people he did all he could is a flat lie, sir.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael...Richard_Clarke

[DanS]

The 100% Clinton factor applied to 9/11 was in relation to Bush's 0% factor applied to 9/11. There is some debate about how much impact presidents have on these situations, especially since the US presidency was apportioned only a modest amount of power by the constitution.

I'd split the 2001 recession more like 90% Clinton/10% Bush.

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by DanS
The 100% Clinton factor applied to 9/11 was in relation to Bush's 0% factor applied to 9/11. There is some debate about how much impact presidents have on these situations, especially since the US presidency was apportioned only a modest amount of power by the constitution.

I'd split the 2001 recession more like 90% Clinton/10% Bush.

...and here comes the backpedaling.

Leaving aside the issue of your dubious assignments of responsibility, it's unlikely that your opinion will be shared by most people when the Bush admin is resigned to the history books. There are plenty of people voting for Hillary right now who are doing on the basis of their appreciation of Bill, and that in turn stems from their perception of the Clinton years as "good years," regardless of who or what was ultimately responsible for the prosperity of those years.

Most people don't share your knee-jerk attribution of the problems of the Bush administration to Clinton, and you're deluding yourself if you think Bush is going to be remembered positively for the reasons you outlined earlier. People are going to think "bad economy, 9/11, pointless war" and that will be about it. I doubt many historians, popular or otherwise, will be much more charitable.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by DanS


Iraq has already turned around

Nope. Iraq has temporarily stabilized, thanks to the fact that we finally have the boots on the ground that should have been there 4 years ago (and no, Bush correcting his own monumental screw-ups does not net him and brownie points). The measure of whether Iraq has turned around will be whether that stability remains once the surge troops are withdrawn. Given that they were supposed to be withdrawn by July, and Petreus is now urging Bush to keep them there until at least September, I'd say any claims of a turnaround are decidedly premature.

And we won't even get into the fact that Bush's own metric for the success of the surge was the emergence of a stable, self-sustaining Iraqi government. By that measure, the surge has actually failed.

[DanS]

Originally posted by Cyclotron
Most people don't share your knee-jerk attribution of the problems of the Bush administration to Clinton

I wonder where you have divined my reasoning for these attributions, since I have not described it here.

[Cyclotron]

When your attributions are so preposterous, I don't really care what you think passes for "reasoning."

[DanS]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
Nope. Iraq has temporarily stabilized

Well, we have a difference in characterization. The validity of each will be decided by the future course of events. At a minimum, I think you would have to admit that Iraq could continue to stabilize and that Al Qaeda in Iraq could be defeated.

I don't think we should forget that Lincoln monumentally mismanaged much of the Civil War, and was nearly voted out of office because of it, but was judged by the ultimate outcome.

Edit: I view Petraeus as Bush's U.S. Grant. Both Lincoln and Bush were casting about for a competent general for a long time before they found their man.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by DanS
I view Petraeus as Bush's U.S. Grant.

Considering that Grant's most innovative strategy was just throwing wave after wave of conscripts into a meatgrinder until attrition and inadequate supply wore the enemy down, I wouldn't say that's a ringing endorsement.

[DanS]

It was Lincoln's strategy as well as Grant's. Lincoln's letters to his generals imploring them to embrace the meat-grinder are pretty impressive.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by DanS
It was Lincoln's strategy as well as Grant's. Lincoln's letters to his generals imploring them to embrace the meat-grinder are pretty impressive.

That being the case, your analogy would mean that Petraeus is taking marching orders from the White House moreso than correcting its past mistakes. I'd give him more credit than that.

[DanS]

In the broadest sense, Petraeus is taking marching orders from the White House. I think you discount too much the lack of adequate leadership from our generals in Iraq before Petraeus. We all would like to think well of our military leadership, and would like to avoid criticizing them. But it seems in actual fact that good generalship for the task at hand is a rarer quality than we might have imagined.

[Cyclotron]

It also means we should probably be wary of a Petraeus presidential bid.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Cyclotron
It also means we should probably be wary of a Petraeus presidential bid.

Damn, if he's a Herculean enough figure to actually clean up that mess earlier than 2012, he's got my vote!

[Ramo]

There's no evidence that the surge has succeeded in creating long term political stability. Most recently the legislation supposedly reversing de-Ba'athification ended up being precisely the oppposite and was vetoed, and the provincial elections were scuttled because SIIC was afraid of losing power to the Sadrists.

Touting success regarding AQI is absurd. Not only are they a complete artifact of our presence, the Iraqi Sunni Arabs never liked 'em, and they would've been crushed with or without our help. What's more, the thugs we empowered in the Anbar Salvation Front are starting to turn against the gov't. Who'd have guessed (besides everyone)?

But yeah Dan, history'll vindicate Dear Leader. Keep believing that.

Specifically, y'all should run on that idea come November.