By Ivan Eland
During his tenure so far, Obama has used air power to
oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, surged American forces in Afghanistan to
satisfy the U.S. military, re-entered the civil war in Iraq, and extended the
bombing to Syria. He found and killed Osama bin Laden, which George W. Bush was
not focused enough to do for seven years, and also expanded Bush's drone wars
against terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Obama's "pivot to
Asia" really means beefing up U.S. alliances and military presence to run
a neo-containment policy against a rising China. Finally, Obama is augmenting
military forces and conducting more NATO exercises in Eastern Europe in
response to Russia's mischief in Ukraine.
By historical standards, Obama is a practitioner of
militaristic activism. Yet, he is not the first president to suffer from a
misplaced label of weakness. Remember George H.W. Bush? George W. Bush's father
won two smashing military victories, the invasion of Panama and the massive
Desert Storm, in only four years as president -- only to be deemed a
"wimp" anyway. The elder Bush intervened more and on a larger scale
for his time in office than did Ronald Reagan, who had the most macho image of
any president Teddy Roosevelt. [more...]
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