Excerpts from President Obama's Peace Prize speech
Now He Actualy did a great speech today. This will most likely help his poll numbers and he could be getting a little smarter and acting like the President of America. If he did more conservative speeches like he did then maybe he is changing for the better. What do you all think?
Play Video 
Play Video 
Chris - If Faux News said it was a rather good speech then I would have to say that they are liars and they distort the news!!!!
ReplyDeleteI can guess that Bruce was getting off on Obummer's speech, especially when he was talking about using the iron fist of the US military to wage war to get peace, or something like that. Bruce loves him a war-monger president.
I didn't listen to the speech yet, to be honest, but I voted for and expected to get a liberal and certainly don't want more war.
ReplyDeleteI want to get the hell out of Afghanistan.
I heard the speech but I don't know what anyone on Fox said about it yet. I don't think the left will like his pro war speech though. Bruce I thought you lived in Rochester Hills not Afghaninstan?lol. That speech gave me hope for Obama and our country.
ReplyDeleteIm not the SHARPEST tool in the SHED BUT what in the HELL did he DO to get the AWARD? I dont have any IDEA and JUST want to KNOW!
ReplyDeleteOh Well Obamas Flying back from OSLO with the Award BUT then in A couple days he FLYS back to Copenhagen for the TAX and Trade Talks. Question how is his Carbon Footprint Doing.Just thought MAYBE the Scheduling could/should have been BETTER.
He didn't do anything to get the prize and the million $. And he shoved the prize in the face of the anti war groups. He even told them that war is peace. The fringe anti war cult is up in arms over the speech. And here I thought it was good.
ReplyDeleteThat speech was Bush not Obama. Obama is turning into Bush. I can't believe I voted for that man. He is the most flip flopping President ever.
ReplyDeletewar for peace. bulshit!!!
ReplyDeleteAt no time in recent American military history has a speech delivered by a President of the United States done so much to distance our nation from victory and put the men and woman of the military and intelligence agencies in harm’s way.
ReplyDeletePresident Obama’s big Afghanistan speech caused nary a tremble in the polls. Before he spoke, most Americans didn’t support him. And after? His popularity continues to sink.
It was positively painful to watch Gen. Stanley McChrystal try to explain how you can win by not losing in his Tuesday congressional testimony. He’s doing the president’s bidding, not following a leader who has a clear idea of how to win a war.
It’s not only that President Obama is naïve and ignorant of history and the roles of our military and intelligence communities in world affairs. It’s mostly his inability to lead.
Leadership isn’t an intangible: it’s the ability to convince and inspire people to follow. His legislative successes aren’t proof that he’s a leader. To the contrary: Obama has pronounced big ideas that were already on the liberals’ agenda page. He merely turned them loose and then failed to lead them in the particulars -- the practicabilities and costs -- of the ideas.
On everything from the phony “stimulus” package to socialist health care, Obama is a cheerleader, not a real leader. It’s not just because he is young. It’s that he’s ignorant of important principles and completely at odds with the fact that America is a superpower.
Just consider his Afghanistan speech in the context of his June Cairo speech. Obama is reaching out his open hand to the Islamic radicals in disregard of how many times they slap it away.
In 1899 at the age of 25, Winston Churchill wrote some of the most profound paragraphs of his life.
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”
~ The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899), Volume II pp. 248-250.
At such a young age Churchill’s understanding of Islam and its goal of supreme world dominance is uncanny.
The leaders of “the greatest generation,” the generation that sacrificed hundreds of thousands of American men and women in World War II, understood the importance of achieving victory and of supporting the men and women sent to the front lines every day to protect our nation and the world from tyranny. There were no political considerations to determine how a President “felt” before ordering our nation to war against its enemies. When we were attacked on December 7, 1941, we responded with all of the might a great nation could muster.
Today we are in a Global War on Terror. The United States was attacked by Islamic terrorist’s on September 11, 2001, resulting in the deaths of almost 3,000 innocent men, women and children. One of America’s great war time leaders, President George W. Bush, along with a war time Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, responded. Their policies kept America safe for 8 years and liberated millions. Today, Barack Obama, giving a pallid imitation of a President, has chosen to appease our enemies around the world in his misguided effort to mollify those that would kill us.
ReplyDeleteThe touchy, feely, feminization attitude that permeates American society has found its way to our military decision makers. Our institutions of war with long rich histories of producing courageous war fighters are now producing leaders that are being trained to better understand and be sensitive to our enemies feelings and concerns rather than how to defeat and destroy them.
There are very few leaders today who could have made the wrenching decisions to bomb Dresden, Tokyo or Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those decisions were instrumental in ending World War II and saved millions of American lives. The deaths of civilians as collateral damage while horrible and unfortunate are an intimate and inextricable part of war. Historians will continue to debate the number of lives that would have been saved had the Atomic bomb been ready and used earlier. How many American fathers, husbands, son’s and brothers would have survived had the war been shortened?
Afghanistan is arguably one of the most desolate, insignificant 4th world countries on our planet. It is not Kazakhstan, a country flush with gas and oil, diamonds and gold. Other than Kabul, it is a nation divided by tribes and regions, controlled by warlords. The Western dreams of a centralized government for Afghanistan are just that, dreams. After 9/11 the U.S. conquered Afghanistan killing or capturing most of those responsible for the attack on America and driving out the Taliban. Then we abandoned her like a West African aids victim. If America did not learn from the repercussions of abandonment and is not diligent and committed once again in its efforts to destroy the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, then all of those who have died in Afghanistan and continue to die will die in vain.
At no time in U.S. history has an American president ever half heartedly expanded a war only to advise his enemy that the expansion is temporary. Obama’s decision to provide 30,000 more troops to help defeat the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the correct decision if we expect to prevent safe haven for the terrorists. However, telegraphing his intentions to withdraw our troops in 18 months is misguided and will prove deadly to our soldiers and marines as well as our intelligence experts. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a successful military campaign that did not depend upon reliable, actionable intelligence. I can tell you from personal experience that it is virtually impossible to devise a human intelligence network, humint, when assets are convinced that there is no future or reason for them to cooperate with you.
The message to the warlords in the tribal regions of Afghanistan should be simple and clear. We are leaving. There will be no more American bloodshed in Afghanistan. If you want our continued financial assistance or our friendship, then you must not allow safe harbor to the enemies of the United States. If you do, there will be devastating consequences. There will be Dresden. And we must deliver.
Even NPR last night a guy was saying that that speech could have been from W.
ReplyDeleteBruce, even NPR the other day (the day after he announced he was ramping up the war in Afghanistan) said that that was exactly how he ran his campaign, he said that he was going to do what it took to win the "forgotten" war in Afghanistan. So if you voted for him, and you did all your great research, you would have known that that is what he was going to do. You laud Obummer for trying to ram through health care takeovers, you should laud him for following through on his promise to send more American soldiers to the battlefield. Looks like you should have voted for McCain, and maybe you would have if you hadn't been brainwashed by MoveOn.org. Remember when they said we couldn't afford six more months of Bush's policies? I had no idea that they meant we couldn't afford 6 months, we could afford 4 more years.
The Progressives are also trying to make it look like it is the white peoples faults. I live in Detroit and all my friends and our city reps do is blame the white people in the burbs. I think the progressives blame the color of skin so that nobody focuses on the real problem and that is the democrates.
ReplyDeleteIn my previous life; one of my jobs was to teach leadership and tactics to students at the US Army Ranger School. In this course students are placed in a simulated combat scenario, given a mission to complete and then graded on their units actions to carry out the mission. In a platoon size scenario, there are several graded positions. If the student makes one or more major mistakes they fail the mission. If they fail too many missions they don’t pass the phase and are either dropped from the course or recycled through that particular phase or through the whole course.
ReplyDeleteNone of these are fun, and in some cases failing the course can be a career threatening event. Mindful that the Army needs Ranger School graduates, and that a failed student is a loss in training resources, and trying to be fair, the instructors try (even if former Ranger students don’t believe it) to be judicious when assigning a “No-Go” to a student. But, occasionally something would happen (or not happen) that was so bad, so utterly unacceptable, that instructors would fail the entire chain of command for a patrol. This was a serious event. The battalion commander for that Phase of Ranger School would have to be informed and the entire instructor chain of command would be involved in a review of the reasoning behind the grade and the facts of the case. It was not a casual action.
I thought of that when I read a Washington Post article dated December 6, that described the process of creating the new Afghanistan strategy. In it, there was this account:
In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”
“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of those in the Situation Room asked.
On the face of it, it was impossible — the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a significant part of the population. “We don’t need to do that,” Gates said, according to a participant. “That’s an open-ended, forever commitment.”
But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, and it was enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan — the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.
“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what, in effect, the commander understands he’s been told to do.’ Everybody said, ‘He’s right.’ “
It seems that for 6 months (March – Oct) the Operational Commander (GEN McCrystal) had one understanding of the mission he had been given and the Sec Def and Nat Security Advisor and Commander in Chief had a completely different understanding of the mission. 6 Months!
This is not trivial stuff. Everything starts with the mission. Unless the mission is correctly understood by all involved, there is no chance of a successful outcome, barring a fortunate accident. It is like pulling out of your driveway and driving your car for a couple hours before someone tells you what your destination is. By that time you may not be able to get there from here. Except that in this case you are not driving your car, you are leading tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in a life or death enterprise that will have a major impact for good or ill on dozens of countries.
Think about it this way. What if President Roosevelt, via GEN Marshall, had given this directive prior to D-Day:
“Hey Eisenhower, Take half a million guys, Go swan around in Europe for 6 months, start sometime in June, let us know how it goes, we’ll get back to you after the holidays.”
Not good, right?
That is why this is the type of thing that would earn a “Chain of Command No-Go” for Ranger students and indeed, it is something that the military expects young soldiers two years out of high school to be able to master before before becoming Corporals or Sergeants, let alone Generals. Leaders are expected to communicate the unit’s mission to their troops clearly and to take steps such as brief-backs of their subordinates and informal sampling of the unit to make sure that everyone understands it.
ReplyDeleteI am shocked and worried that something like this could happen. I hope that the Washington Post account is wrong. I hope that it some sort of face saving spin, or a clever ploy of some kind. Heck, I hope it is the cover story for some grand nefarious alien plan to usurp control of the National Command Authority. At least then I would know that someone had a clue!
What scares me even more is that the general tone of the article is that this is a “good” thing! You know, we finally found that pesky fuze that caused the warning light to come on. Now, she runs like a top! Again, I hope this is just spin, but I fear it is not.
Now, understand that I do not blame President Obama or GEN McChrystal. As the article points out, McChrystal had written orders signed by the National Security Advisor (and presumably reviewed by everyone in the chain of command) telling him what his mission was. He was correct. And while I am not a fan of President Obama, and he is ultimately responsible as Commander in Chief, I do not expect him to be a master of the military command and staff process.
That is what all the Generals and Secretaries and Advisors are supposed to do. The fact that they didn’t, tells me that something is seriously wrong. And fixing that is President Obama’s responsibility and it is the responsibility of the relevant oversight committees in Congress.
The rest of us should watch and see if it happens.
Anonymous - Obummer has NO clue how to fix it. All he knows how to do is community organize. Dirty Chicago politics to win BAMN. Once they win they are beholden to many groups, and they will pass laws to favor their patricians. But lead? Shoulda had a McCain.
ReplyDeleteGreat comments and a lot to think about. It would be nice if the Anon's used names. Thank you.
ReplyDelete