UNDERSTANDING OBAMA AND TROOPS ON THE GROUND

This morning the +Steve Kornacki programs was a disaster. I usually enjoy listening to guests’ give and take in a panel discussion format moderated by #Kornacki. The guests are usually intellectuals, college professors and the like, or highly respected journalists. Except for +E. J. Dionne, that was not the case this morning. Dionne is a columnist for the Washington Post and is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institute. The subject was the nature of the Obama response to ISIS. +Patrick Murphy, an ex democratic representative from the state of Pennsylvania was one of the guests. His claim to fame was that he was the first veteran of the Afghanistan war elected to congress.

Principally, Kornacki was saying that a poll indicating 72% of Americans believe we will have “boots on the ground” fighting ISIS. He was making the point that +Obama lied when he said there, “will be no boots on the ground”. He was saying, and his guest supported his contention that Obama campaigned for peace and the American people elected him on that basis but now he is the same as +George W. Bush and wants war. I find this scary, really scary because it seems as if many people believe this is to be case. Think about congress voting on this issue with that understanding of what the American people want and what the #President said. OMG!

I have been around intellectuals all my life and know how easy it is to misunderstand people who do not talking in simple subject-verb sentences. The President did say that there would be no “boots on the ground”. Since then that expression has become a greatly overused trope. What the President said was there would be no “U.S. troops” on the ground.  He went on to explain that we learned from previous wars, (Vietnam and Korean), that if people are not willing to fight for their own freedom, the war will be lost to those seeking dictatorial power. Stated another way, it is nation building but it is the people of those nations who are building their own nation just as we built our nations. This is the foundations of the entire +Arab Spring movements. This means that #Iraqis and #Syrians must fight for their own freedom or they will lose. By extension, it also means that if #Britain and #France and other Arabic nations sending in troops, it is just as wrong as it is for U.S. troops to be there fighting for something the people are not willing to fight for—the lesion learned in #Vietnam.

Look at the poll results cited above and the interpretations of it by the guests. What the results say is that 72% of American People think there will be boots on the “ground” but says nothing about hat they want. The President said it would take boot on the ground to win against ISIS but carefully explained—perhaps too carefully—that he meant no foreigners’ boots.  Think back to Osama bin Laden major claim against the U. S., it was that we had “our” soldiers “boot” on Muslim territory. Think back to the Dick Cheney and George W. Bush war on Iraq. They wanted to take over the Iraqi government and turn it into a U. S. puppet government beholden to American business interests—oil interests.  The president learned from this just as he learned from Vietnam and Korea.  Eventually, E. J. Dionne came on and tried to talk reason but the Kornacki-Murphy nonsense drowned him out.

My fear is that what happened on the program this morning would be what would happen in our House of Representatives, especially when we couple this with the groundless ingrained hate for Obama held by the Republicans. Remember, this “hate” has driven the House of Representatives into inactions on everything making it the worst congress ever in the history of this nation. The strange ways of politics have been revealed by having polls indicate the people want to elect Republican controlled the Senate; apparently they want even more government incompetence—go figure.     

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