I’m still baffled how Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize.
Doing something for peace is not dependent on being a universally good person. You can still save more lifes than you have butchered.
He'd became president January 20 and was awarded the prize on October 9 - he hadn't really had time to do anything meaningful for international relations.
The only way to interpret the prize was as a rebuke on former president George Bush for gleefully upping the ante from a localised tragedy in America into annihilating two countries, countless deaths and destabilising half a continent. It was a passive aggressive "well we can't stop you America, but we saw what you did".
There was a lot more to those invasions history-wise, but the basic message was clear.
Except his legacy is arguably worse. Extrajudicial assassinations, the return of open-air slave markets, the deliberate overthrow of middle east governments that created the power vaccuum filled by ISIL, the inadvertant arming of ISIL through the deliberate arming of Jihadists in Syria (which is an ongoing civil war today)...
Edit: Just to add. Bush (really Dick Cheyney) expanded the power of the Executive with the approval of Congress. Cheyney is a monster who saw 9/11 as a chance to consolidate executive power to the detriment of his rivals and enemies.
Obama extended the power of the Executive largely through legal scheming of the DOJ, the courts abdicating their responsibility, labelling everything under the sun as "state secrets", and ruthlessly destroying the lives of whistleblowers. In fact, when using the secret courts set up by the Bush administration, Obama's still violated and exceeded its authority 5% of the time.
There's clearly one of these that looks more dictatorial than the other and it's not the answer most people want.
Hopefully they consider their decisions going forward, but that seems unlikely.
I could say well Bush lost the popular vote, so clearly anything he did looks more intrinsically dictatorial. Or because he raised private armies. It would be misleading. It doesn't matter how power is consolidated.
I assume you mean in countries outside of Iraq? "Deliberate overthrow", citation please?
I remember a friend in 2003 saying Bush's Iraq misadventure is going to fuck up a lot of things in the middle east... I can't believe how right he turned out to be.
As far as I understand it the Arab Spring came about due to social unrest due to food shortage brought about by climate change (a 2010 forest fire in Russia burned a lot of grain, Russia stopped exporting them, food prices shot up: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=russia+forest+fires+grain+prices+a... ).
Incredibly that has also lead to a lot of war-fleeing refugees, and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe. Also Brexit and Trump?
Libya.
Or as the BBC referred to it, "the worst mistake of Obama's presidency".
It's already largely a settled question that US State Dept policy and actions during that administration massively contributed to the formation of ISIL.
The difference between the Bush and Obama administrations in the middle east is stark. Despite destabilizing Iraq, the US military stayed on the ground and at least attempted to create a stable transition of power (and over time largely succeeded, at least by comparison).
Obama's destabilizing actions were followed up by abandonment and power vaccuums filled up by extremists that we armed. This is no-brainer kind of shit that we stumbled our way into, Homer Simpson style.
His foreign policy disasters weren't limited to the Middle East either, considering our lack of intervention and abandonment of our southeast asian strategic allies during the Scarborough Shoal incident.
> Or as the BBC referred to it, "the worst mistake of Obama's presidency".
Is that in this article where Obama admitted that himself? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36013703 . Unlike Bush/Cheney who never admitted anything? (But we're not judging these men for their honesty at the moment, are we).
> Despite destabilizing Iraq, the US military stayed on the ground and at least attempted to create a stable transition of power (and over time largely succeeded, at least by comparison).
Huh.. and you're asserting that Obama didn't continue that policy? Sorry but Iraq didn't turn to a peaceful and solved problem in 2008.
Seems like you're just throwing sweeping generalizations and one word answers to complex problems ("Libya"), and sadly I don't know the whole issue in depth either.
If there's any blinders, its the fawning treatment he received form the press for largely doing nothing or worse than nothing. Notice how much more criticism has come at him from the left since leaving office.
He's an adored president with an abysmal legacy. I voted for him, by the way. I'm vocal with the criticism because I feel I share in the responsibility for what happened.
> Huh.. and you're asserting that Obama didn't continue that policy? Sorry but Iraq didn't turn to a peaceful and solved problem in 2008.
I'm not saying that it was, but we and our allies already had troops committed in the region. If we'd left, we would have been leaving our allies holding the bag.
I was comparing Iraq to Libya, where after we removed Gaddafi, we didn't do shit. That situation created all of those other things that I mentioned.
Later on with the leaked cables, we found out that it was largely because he was trying to create a gold-backed pan-African currency that would have harmed French central banking interests in the region.
One of the first things the "revolutionaries" that ousted Gaddafi did was create a central bank. While they were still fighting for territory.
Rinse and repeat with Trump, who arguably has a better track record at least in terms of starting wars.
If you take a step back from how US politics works in the media (mass media and social media) you realize it’s just a complete clown show. Any one who gets their “news” from those sources is just along for the ride.
I never got how Bush was supposed to be both an idiot and a mastermind.
Edit: I am recounting the narrative as I remember it, not endorsing it.
I personally don't distinguish much between these (I'm basically in agreement with Einstein's stated views on the matter) but to pretend that our global human society doesn't believe in these distinctions is somewhat silly.
The US president can mass murder hundreds of children (Obama did just this) and not be seen as a criminal, even by that group, provided it falls into the correct category listed above.
Of course it all started with the Patriot Act. But even looking at who keeps voting for that and keeping it alive and you can't just blame Bush either.
It's like there's no options for Americans politically which doesn't involve massive "black budgets" and secret courts doing who knows what. It's bipartisan and even plenty of the worst Iraq war supporters all have had career revivals in recent years because the media + social media decided that only one thing was bad, the current president. All bad deeds in the past were forgotten for the old set.
Endless "Secret Wars" seem terribly undemocratic and dangerous to me - for the obvious complete lack of public courts, true due process, or war crimes laws that normally are adhered to.
And I also see no proper reckoning in the relevant future either as long as these same "good guys" are back in power.
So I guess we're stuck with it.
Quote from Obama [3]: "Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_murder
[2] https://www.cfr.org/blog/obamas-final-drone-strike-data
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-said-hes-really-good-a...
Then after a series of complicated political decision making, he started more. And there are always perfect legitimate reasons, as judging from Obama's perspective and described in the book, that make those things happen.
After a while reading the book, I started to see how futile it has been for US to truly behave as the nation aspires to. Without a equal counter weight, there seems no possibility for the nation's political machine to follow common sense, it's always enemy or ally, and dealing with enemy always involves military power.
Unfortunately, things started taking a more sinister turn as the years went on, so it seemed the prize had been given too prematurely.
Being ignorant and loud at the same time, does not make someone honest.
I post about that extremely often (sorry), but it's because it's so important. It's probably the single biggest factor causing problems here.