Quote:
Originally Posted by funkychinaman
I would like to point out that he didn't do anything that GWB wouldn't have done. In the end, he didn't negotiate bin Laden's surrender, he didn't coax bin Laden's friends to turn on him, they took him out with brute force, shooting first and asking questions later, just like GWB would have.
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Let's rephrase that a bit. While I (and many other commentators) have long since noticed that Obama's foreign policy is pretty much indistinguishable from Dubya's at this point, it would be more accurate to say that Obama now is more like Bush in the last two years of his presidency. If we talk "classical" neo-con Bush doctrine (invade countries, impose regime change, seek to spread democracy), Obama is still at least an improvement in that regard. But again, Bush himself was an improvement over Bush by the end.
Also, while Obama has been using drone attacks and targeted killings with a frequency that even Bush never approached, it is human intelligence and cooperation with foreign assets that makes all of this possible. There is a lot of debate right now amongst counterterrorism scholars about targeted killings and Obama's use of them (some scholars claim that it's undermining our "soft power" capabilities in the Muslim world). Personally, I am a huge fan of strikes like the one that killed Bin Laden - whether it's drones or SF who conduct them. Al-Qaeda's entire program is based on the assumption that they can get us to keep invading Muslim countries and then bleeding us of our power with guerrilla warfare (the way that the Afghan mujahideen did to the USSR). Bush was stupid enough to fall for it, while still failing to kill Bin laden.
As far as I am concerned, Obama's administration has perfected an effective counter to the Islamists' style of warfare; they may still be able to parade around their "martyrs" in the Arab media who are killed by the drone attacks, but it's much harder to sell young jihadis on the idea of dying gloriously while fighting the Crusaders. Because there's nothing romantic about getting taken out by a Hellfire missile or killed in bed by Delta operators. Plus, targeted killings are cheap enough that we can do them indefinitely - whereas occupying an entire country is both expensive and futile, and almost always guarantees that the insurgents will win as long as their cause survives (no matter how many die). The fact that Obama recognized the efficacy of this method of warfare and has continued to employ it is something for which he deserves credit. I can forgive any and all of his retarded leftist peacenik rhetoric as long as he keeps the targeted killings going.