Judge President Obama’s results by how desperate Republicans are to reverse them. And if you still aren’t certain how transformative the 44th president’s policies and actions have been in transforming the American economy, read Michael Grunwald’s new Politico Magazine mini-opus “The Nation He Built.” As in his 2012 book The New New Deal, which revealed the…
The most important success for Obama has been his Middle East policy.
He has accomplished more than any other president in 50 years in keeping us out of another war. Obama has also changed the conditions on the ground in the Middle East so much that it will be extremely difficult for the next president to begin a new war.
Unfortunately one of the two main candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination believes that Obama has been too weak militarily.
That is not the candidate that I will be voting for.
Success in the Middle East? The West Bank settlements have expanded and become entrenched. There is starvation in Gaza. He sponsored a military coup against democracy in Egypt and winks at death penalty proceedings against a hundred defendants at a time in one day trials. Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen are in bloody civil wars with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and religious wars have spread throughout north Africa. We have special operations forces and drone attacks throughout the region.
He has overstayed the withdrawal date for Afghanistan leaving open the possibility of the next president doubling down. Almost anomalously, he stuck with diplomacy to the very end in Iran and achieved a breakthrough. I would be hard pressed to give Obama higher marks than Clinton or Carter on diplomatic initiatives.