IS AMERICA A BULLY?

You started it, as you did the last one, and I'm not interested. Foofie's done what he always does, and turns every thread into a discussion about him. It's the only subject he knows anything about.

Quote:

...I think we'll agree that the last try, Iraq, was an unmitigated disaster. Obama's careful if not timid foreign policy is a direct consequence of this loss of geopolitical influence.

Iraq wasn't bullying. Iraq was investigating whether an evil madman had weapons so powerful that one use of one could kill half a million people, not to mention enforcement of a violated surrender treaty.

Finn said: we didn't go to Afghanistan for oil. We went there to put an end to al Qaeda's having a haven from which to plan and launch their attacks against us. The Afghans don't have oil

Obama was, in my view, on the sane side of things but ran into a bulwark when he became president; he's also a natural get a longer, but he started out getting along from the right side of the road.

Olivier said: Thus he [Obama] failed to close Gitmo or to do anything significant for Palestine.

Gitmo was not going to be closed on short order…and probably will be there when the next person takes office.

Quote:

Gitmo was not going to be closed on short order…and probably will be there when the next person takes office.

Let's hope the next president will have greater moral standards...

Which is why a lot of people don't want to lead; not in their personal lives and not on a national or world stage.

The people who do want to lead and will do just about anything to obtain a position of leadership don't really get to whine: "Making decisions is not easy!"

One of the things I dislike the most about our president is this facade he often adopts of the reluctant leader who was drated to lead the country rather than an extremely ambitious politician who did all in his power to obtain the position.

He didn't "inherit" a poor economy in the way he has used the phrase, as if he thought he was elected to the top leadership position of a country with a vibrant and robust economy, only to have a deep recession thrust upon him.

He knew damned well the economy was in free fall and, in fact, he promised he would get back in shape well before now.

He also knew about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, before he sought the office.

Did he know as many of the facts about all of these problems as Bush and his close advisors? Probably not, but if he had done more with the short time in the Senate (or stuck around long enough to benefit from one of the major power positions in this country) he would have been able to learn a lot more of these facts than he possessed when he took office.

Instead he told Bob Gates that he was bored in the Senate.

Bored?!

Obviously in his mind there was nothing new he could learn in that position and he was very ready for Prime Time. He thought he had all the answers, he just had to get the power to implement them; to transform America.

Obviously someone has to have a pretty hefty ego to think they can be president, but his is enormous, and it is on display all of the time. He makes no effort to hide it, so why should he be cut any slack when, inevitably, the complexity of problems overwhelms his genius?

Romeo said: Obama sent Sec of State John Kerry to Iran to tell them they can go on building nuke reactors, I bet that put a smile on the muslim world's faces
Olivier said: And that put a smile on MY face as well. I am all for balance of power in the middle east.

WASHINGTON — President Obama said on Tuesday that he would recommit himself to closing the Guantánamo Bay prison, a goal that he all but abandoned in the face of Congressional opposition in his first term and that faces steep challenges now.

It’s not sustainable,” Mr. Obama said at a White House news conference. “The notion that we’re going to keep 100 individuals in no man’s land in perpetuity,” he added, makes no sense. “All of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this? Why are we doing this?”

Describing the prison in Cuba as a waste of taxpayer money that has had a damaging effect on American foreign policy, Mr. Obama said he would try again to persuade Congress to lift restrictions on transferring inmates. He also said he had ordered a review of “everything that we can do administratively.”

But there is no indication that Mr. Obama’s proposal to close the prison, as he vowed to do upon taking office in 2009 after criticizing it during the presidential campaign, has become any more popular. Mr. Obama remarked that “it’s a hard case to make” because “it’s easy to demagogue the issue.”

The plan for Guantánamo he proposed — moving any remaining prisoners to a Supermax-style prison in Illinois — was blocked by Congress, which barred any further transfers of detainees onto domestic soil. A spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and one of the leading opponents of closing the prison, said on Tuesday that “there is wide, bipartisan opposition in Congress to the president’s goal of moving those terrorists to American cities and towns.”

Mr. Obama made his remarks following the arrival at the prison of more than three dozen Navy nurses, corpsmen and specialists to help deal with a mass hunger strike by inmates, many of whom have been held for over 11 years without trial. As of Tuesday, 100 of the 166 prisoners were officially deemed to be participating, with 21 now being force-fed a nutritional supplement through tubes inserted in their noses.

“I don’t want these individuals to die,” Mr. Obama said.

Both conservatives and civil libertarians said that under existing law, Mr. Obama could be doing more to reduce the number of low-level detainees held at the prison.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California, noted that the Obama administration had never exercised the power it has had since 2012 to waive, on a case-by-case basis, most of the restrictions lawmakers have imposed on transferring detainees to countries with troubled security conditions.

“For the past two years, our committee has worked with our Senate counterparts to ensure that the certifications necessary to transfer detainees overseas are reasonable,” Mr. McKeon said. “The administration has never certified a single transfer.”

Human rights groups also urged Mr. Obama to direct the Pentagon to start issuing waivers, and said he should appoint a White House official to run Guantánamo policy with the authority to resolve interagency disputes. For example, because of disagreements over evidence tainted by torture, the administration has missed by more than a year a deadline to begin parole-style hearings by so-called Periodic Review Boards.

“There’s more to be done, but these are the two essential first steps the president can take now to break the Guantánamo logjam,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Another group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents detainees, urged Mr. Obama to lift his self-imposed ban on repatriations to Yemen, where a branch of Al Qaeda is active. Of the 86 low-level detainees who were designated in January 2010 for potential transfer but remain incarcerated, 56 are Yemenis.

Asked for greater details about Mr. Obama’s intentions, a National Security Council spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, said the president was “considering a range of options for ways that we can reduce the population there,” including “reappointing a senior official at the State Department to renew our focus on repatriating or transferring” lower-risk detainees. The administration reassigned the previous diplomat charged with that task in January and has not replaced him.

“We will also work to fully implement the Periodic Review Board process, which we acknowledge has not moved forward quickly enough,” she added.

Mr. Obama was ambiguous about one of the most difficult problems raised by Guantánamo: what to do with dozens of detainees deemed too risky to release but not feasible to prosecute. His policy has been not to release those prisoners, but to continue to imprison them indefinitely under the laws of war — just somewhere else.

Yet at another point, Mr. Obama appeared to question that policy at a time when the war in Iraq has ended, the one in Afghanistan is winding down and the original makeup of Al Qaeda has been decimated.

“The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried,” he said, “that is contrary to who we are, contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”

The Obama administration has said little about Guantánamo for months. But recent developments have forced the issue.

Military officials who oversee the prison have requested $200 million, amid budget cuts, to replace deteriorating facilities with permanent structures. And in February, after years of relative quiet, the detainees began protesting, beginning a hunger strike that has involved more and more prisoners.

In response to what the military said were attempts to block surveillance cameras, guards in early April raided the cellblocks where formerly compliant detainees had been living communally for years, locking them in individual cells. The move generated wide publicity.

Two weeks ago, the military allowed several reporters to visit the prison, where they said calm had returned, and gave a detailed account of what they said were efforts to restore order. But during the same visit, a Muslim cultural adviser to the military predicted to reporters that detainees would soon succeed in committing suicide; there were at least two attempts by detainees to hang themselves in April.

The adviser said the only thing that would persuade detainees to settle down would be the transfer of an inmate out of the prison, which would give the others hope.

The military’s response to the hunger strike has revived complaints by medical ethics groups that say doctors should not force-feed prisoners who decide not to eat, reviving a similar clash over Guantánamo detainees from the Bush administration.

Last week, the president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Jeremy A. Lazarus, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel saying that any doctor who participated in forcing a prisoner to eat against his will was violating “core ethical values of the medical profession.”

“Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” Dr. Lazarus wrote.

Ramzi Kassem, a City University of New York law professor who represents several detainees, said he had talked last week to a Yemeni client, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, who said a guard had shot him with rubber-coated pellets at close range during the raid.

Since then, Mr. Kassem said he had been told, the prisoners have been denied soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste and their legal papers. A client told him, he said, that he had not eaten in 80 days and that he had stopped drinking after the raid and was now being force-fed twice a day after being tied to a restraint chair.

He quoted Mr. Alwi as saying: “I do not want to kill myself. My religion prohibits suicide. But I will not eat or drink until I die, if necessary, to protest the injustice of this place. We want to get out of this place.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks about the prison came in an otherwise sedate news conference, and at times he appeared almost anguished.

“This is a lingering problem that is not going to get better,” he said. “It’s going to get worse. It’s going to fester.”