Oakford and Salisbury explained — President Obama's foreign policy

© 2016 Peter Free

 

25 September 2016

 

 

What can I do, I'm just the President

 

Samuel Oakford and Peter Salisbury recently explained President Obama's Middle East policy.

 

With regard to American support of Saudi Arabia's abominable proxy war in Yemen, they wrote that:

 

 

A CENTCOM spokesperson said that U.S. tankers offload fuel regardless of what a [Saudi] jet’s [Yemen] target is, or whether the mission has been preplanned and extensively vetted.

 

According to the UN, more than 2,200 civilians have been killed by coalition airstrikes since the beginning of their war in Yemen. Bombs dropped by Saudi coalition planes have hit schools, markets, factories, and hospitals.

 

A recent project to track all Saudi airstrikes . . . estimated that a full third have hit civilian sites.

 

[T]he Saudis have blocked efforts at the UN to establish an independent human-rights investigation. When they were listed on a UN annex for killing children in airstrikes, Riyadh threatened to cut funding to the UN.

 

Increasingly skeptical of America’s ability to shape events on the ground in the Middle East, Obama sees little incentive to overturn the status quo . . . .

 

A U.S. official . . . summed up the Obama administration’s prevailing attitude. Yemen was already a “complete shit show” before the war, he argued, echoing Obama’s use of a phrase he is said to use privately to describe Libya. The Houthis are a nasty militia . . . and Yemen would be a “shit show” whatever the United States does.

 

So why further degrade a sometimes-unpleasant, but necessary relationship with the Saudis to produce the same end result?

 

© 2016 Samuel Oakford and Peter Salisbury, Yemen Has Become the Graveyard of the Obama Doctrine, Defense One (23 September 2016) (resequenced extracts)

 

 

The Obama Doctrine appears to hold that killing innocents is necessary

                               

They're all "gonna" suffer and die anyway.

 

 

The moral? — What best distinguishes the United States' self-claimed exceptionalism is its blood-encrusted rapaciousness

 

Our last two presidents have presented us with notable strategic failures. Yet, both foreign policy "doctrines" have profited the American War Machine. President Obama's cynical thinking may be less a reflection of him, than of our culture.

 

On the other hand, the President Obama never struck me as persuasively striving to make himself or us better. His level of professional achievement seems to have halted at the Self-Enriching Pragmatist Plateau.

 

Perhaps this low bar is the best that our oligarchically militaristic society can generate. Its lamentable crop of 2016 American presidential candidates appears to affirm so.

 

No respite for the innocent looms likely.