[silverleaf]

” Fighting a land war which unavoidably costs casualties to a society unwilling to see its own blood shed, is a policy which ultimately cannot prevail over time. Worse, invading Iraq has nothing to do with protecting the homeland from terrorists and had the unintended consequence of generating an Arab spring which is turned into an Arab nightmare.”

Agree with you on first statement (brilliant)
Disagree on the rest.

In 2002, Bush's taking the fight against terrorism to a 2 front war was not a flawed strategy.

The strategic question after attacking al Qaeda in Afghanistan was whether they would stay fight and die there, or flee and set up again somewhere else. It was correctly assessed that al Qaeda’s leadership would flee and find shelter under another regime- the most likely and deadly to our interests being Iraq and Saddam Hussein, whose flouting of Western sanctions had proven highly successful and emboldening to him. Petraeus pulled it out in Iraq, did a brilliant job after applying lessons learned and implementing a surge - and his success then so threatened the treacherous US democrat party that they, with our pwnded media, feverishly campaigned successfully to a war weary and information deprived US on Iraq's costs to end the war - and then when it was convenient, they also ended the career of Petraeus

It was obama’s treachery against his own country, his world apology tour to bash America to Egyptian students at al Azhar University n Egypt, his calls to and covert adminstration contacts with radical islamists and the muslim brotherhood to “community organize” against the pro-Western regimes in Egypt and even Libya (Qadaffi, while a wild card, had turned over his covert nuclear program to the West and begun seeking closer ties)...this is what led to the destructive “Arab spring”, a US betrayal of the very idealists and reformers obama claimed (lied about) to be trying to inspire. The world should have seen this when Obama ignored and thus condemned the attempted social uprising against extremists led by students and the middle class in Iran.

[nathanbedford]

I agree for the most part with your brief history of Obama's foreign policy. The man is not a patriot, to the contrary, he is an enemy of the country. My point was never to rehabilitate Obama but to point out that our policy was flawed from the beginning. It is unfortunate that Obama was among the first to say so and it is not easy to get people to care what his motives were when he was doing it.

My point is that the advances and setbacks which you describe are relevant to a limited period of time. If Obama had not undone those advances which we had made, time would have done so because our problem as outlined in reply #9 is cultural and, speaking of time, a time warp. We could occupy Falluja for decades but upon our withdrawal the forces of superstition would return as surely as the tides.