{"id":17902,"date":"2015-12-08T11:36:33","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T18:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17902"},"modified":"2015-12-08T11:37:56","modified_gmt":"2015-12-08T18:37:56","slug":"tuesday-bag-o-pussy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17902","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Bag o’ Pussy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cat-in-the-bag\"So President Obama, in the wake of the home-grown terrorist attack in San Bernardino, goes on TV to explain his ISIS strategy and to urge calm, and the entire right rejects him out of hand, saying he’s weak, doesn’t have a strategy, loves Muslims, and hates America. One of Fox News’ military “experts” calls him a total pussy<\/a>. Why? Because he didn’t announce he was going all out\u00a0against ISIS?<\/p>\n

After the\u00a0terrorist attack in Paris, I said Obama needed to do something decisive about ISIS<\/a>, lest the widespread (yet totally false)\u00a0perception that\u00a0Democrats are\u00a0weak on defense\u00a0cost Hillary or Bernie\u00a0the 2016 election. What I had in mind was taking the gloves off in the air campaign against ISIS. I now think I was being not only simple-minded, but pointlessly bloody-minded as well.<\/p>\n

The president’s opponents (and much of the media) pretend not to know\u00a0that for the past 15 months a coalition of nations, led by the USA, has been bombing ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria.\u00a0As of three days ago<\/a>, the coalition has carried out\u00a08,556 airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.\u00a0Three quarters of those strikes have been\u00a0flown by US forces, and to date\u00a0the US Air Force alone has dropped\u00a022,000 munitions on ISIS targets. In the last two or three days, we may indeed have stepped up these attacks, but information on that is not yet firm. Russia, which recently entered the arena, is not part of the coalition, and I don’t know how many sorties they’ve flown or how many munitions they’ve dropped.<\/p>\n

For months now, scuttlebutt from frustrated American aircrews has been leaking\u00a0to the media,\u00a0as in these stories<\/a> of American fighter\/bombers\u00a0returning to bases and aircraft carriers with unexpended ordnance, unable to get clearance to attack ISIS targets. As in Vietnam, authority to engage enemy forces has been taken from local commanders and kicked up the chain, perhaps in some cases\u00a0all the way to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense, if not the Commander-in-Chief\u00a0himself. Shades of LBJ, right?<\/p>\n

Why is it so hard to get clearance to attack ISIS targets? Because ISIS deliberately swims in a sea of civilians, and\u00a0experience has taught us\u00a0that killing\u00a0non-combatants only\u00a0makes more enemies.<\/p>\n

But what if Obama\u00a0said fuck it, Syrians and Iraqis have had plenty of time to root these ISIS bastards out, and if they’re not gonna do it why don’t we drop warning leaflets Thursday and\u00a0then level ISIS-occupied cities\u00a0Friday, civilian casualties be damned? That, I’m ashamed to say, is what I had in mind after the Paris attacks.<\/p>\n

And then I remembered something. Today’s frustrated aircrews are a lot like the\u00a0frustrated American fighter jocks\u00a0who couldn’t attack certain targets in Vietnam because LBJ and Bob McNamara and General Westmoreland kept interfering with the rules of engagement.\u00a0But that wasn’t always the case in Vietnam: at certain points in the war both LBJ and Nixon\u00a0lifted restrictions and our aircrews were allowed to bomb the ever-lovin’ shit out of North Vietnam.\u00a0And what happened after all those Rolling Thunder<\/a> and Arc Light<\/a> missions?\u00a0Right\u00a0…\u00a0Ho Chi Minh\u00a0won the war anyway.<\/p>\n

There’s a lesson there, and I think\u00a0President Obama has that lesson in mind.\u00a0No, I don’t know what he should do, but I’m glad he didn’t do what I initially wanted him to do, because it would backfire on us for generations to come, just as the pointless war George W. Bush started in Iraq is backfiring on us now.<\/p>\n

Criticism of Obama is agenda-driven (that agenda being total opposition to anything a a black Democrat president does) and would be\u00a0just as nasty\u00a0no matter what he did. Killing Osama bin Laden? Total pussy. Busting up dozens of planned terrorist plots against American targets? Total pussy.\u00a0Preventing a repeat of 9\/11? Total pussy. Bombing ISIS? Total pussy.\u00a0Ah, but if Putin drops a few bombs on ISIS, more than a year after Obama\u00a0started doing it, he’s a real man, right?<\/p>\n

I’m proud of my president and thankful he knows how to keep his head when all about him are losing theirs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Criticism of Obama is agenda-driven (that agenda being total opposition to anything a a black Democrat president does) and would be just as nasty no matter what he did. Killing Osama bin Laden? Total pussy. Busting up dozens of planned terrorist plots against American targets? Total pussy. Preventing a repeat of 9\/11? Total pussy. Bombing ISIS? Total pussy. Ah, but if Putin drops a few bombs on ISIS, more than a year after Obama started dropping bombs on ISIS, he’s a real man, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,16,14,8,22,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-media","category-military","category-politics","category-terrorism","category-war"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17902"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17907,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17902\/revisions\/17907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}