War, Makes For Some Decent Movies

Let me first start off by saying that Obama is my favorite president of this decade, and Bill Clinton was certainly my favorite President in the '90s. And both of these President's start off their respective, let's call them "intervention" speeches, with a brief explanation of where in the world we were even sending our military. This follows a recent tradition in American warfare dating back to Vietnam where we seem to be fighting wars in places that our general public has neither heard of nor can even locate on a map. A large theme of their speeches includes beating it into the viewer's mind that we have a mandate to do this. In both cases, the President at the time emphasizes the support and authorization that we have both from the UN and NATO. Clinton's speech however does not really include a name-calling section where he calls Milosevic certain nicknames. He maintains that Milosevic has legitimacy to lead his people, but that he has gone too far and is violated the terms of previous peace accords and resolutions. In Obama's case, the Libyan leader Gaddafi has indeed lost legitimacy to lead, and rightfully portrayed as a tyrant and a terrorist. Both President's stress the need to only be a defense force, not an attack and occupy force. This is vital, in my opinion for keeping the American Public at your side. If they know we are only using our superior technology and relatively safe bombing raids that only cost a bit of money but rarely any lives, then the public remains happy and supportive.

Barack Obama, in his speech, lays out the reasons why we should intervene in some countries and not others. Obama accurately states, with an odd level of truth, that the US just cannot be counted on to intervene in every place where people are being suppressed. He goes on to say that we should not use that excuse to never act on preventing a massacre of the innocent. This is exactly the position I wish all President's would take. No lying, just the truth about our capabilities. Obama explained how he was not going to sit by and wait for pictures of mass graves before acting. This position was also taken by Clinton in that he explained that he was not going to wait for another holocaust to occur before acting. And he presented the hypothetical "what if we went to war with Germany sooner? How many lives could have been saved." In my opinion these are all great reasons for going to war to protect civilians.

These speeches don't exactly present a doctrine with points, although they do outline a general foreign policy belief and both are similar. Both Presidents are willing to intervene when both our interests and the lives of innocent people are at stake, but both are also reluctant to repeat the mistakes of previous Presidents (Bush and Bush, for Somalia and Iraq respectively) in putting boots on the ground and taking a bigger responsibility than solely defense of people. The problem now is what to do with the other countries experiencing the same rebellion with the same overbearing, murderous governments. My mind goes to Bahrain, a country with few American interests. I doubt that the Americans or anyone will intervene here because of its little use to anybody. The reason we went into Libya is because both the Arab League and the Opposition asked us to. I think Obama will play this one very carefully to make sure nothing goes wrong and so he retains his military bargaining for the rest of his Presidency. Had all this happened during the Bush presidency, he would not have been able to send troops without a massive world outcry because bush had failed so miserably in Iraq.