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Originally posted by Nippy'sReceipts
His 1st term was far more active military. He did a troop surge in Afghanistan in his first year in office which actually upset liberals. He started droning Pakistan. He killed Bin Laden. He intervened in Libya. He armed the Syrian rebels.
It is this term where he has really stepped back after seeing how all that **** backfired. Arming the rebels just led to ISIS in Syria. Killing Gaddafi made Libya in chaos. And the troop surge made the Taliban gain power in Afghanistan.
The only really dumb thing he did was announce they were leaving Iraq in late 2011. You never announce the timetable you are leaving to the enemy, and the Joint Chiefs told him this. But he did it for political reason because he was worried about re-election and he had to brag about ending the war to get the Dems happy enough to vote.
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Killing Bin Laden was seen as a good thing. And yeah he did continue the drones program. I don't think there's a single presidential candidate who would discontinue that program besides Jill Stein nn. Aghanistan and Pakistan are pretty much terror states though. And drones kill less civilians than carpet bombing and shelling anyway. As for Syrian rebels, didn't we start arming them in 2013 so in his second term? I remember the program getting approved in 2012.
And I don't think sending troops there was what empowered Taliban. It's getting them back home what created a stronghold for Taliban. As for the announcement re Iraq, Bush had already signed an agreement with Iraq to get all of the troops back home by the end of 2011 so Obama chose to abide by that instead of leaving troops there. He and Hillary disagreed on that but ofc he got his way since she was his employee after all. Nevertheless Bush started that problem and Obama didn't stop it. At the time, Iraq wanted us out so they have to take some responsibility too.
Obama was still anti-military in his first term as far as presidents go. Bill, Bush and HW were bigger hawks. And I never fully liked the rebels arming program because of how proxy it is. Carter and Reagan already made that mistake with the Mujahideen. Building an army would be a safer choice than arming rebel groups especially after we've seen how they turned on each other in Libya.
