In response to Ms. Monahan’s so-called personal defense 01/01/’16 [Letter to the Editor] titled “Leading from behind” rebutting my 12/27/’15 [Letter to the Editor] “Several perceptions of Reality,” that served as a rebuttal to her 12/21/’15 [Letter to the Editor] titled “Obama’s inactions fueling Trump’s reactions,” please be kind enough, Ms. Monahan, to pardon my interruption to make a few realistic points about why Mr. Obama is deliberately leading from behind in the war on ISIS.
It is not a secret that most of the leaders of ISIS are from the former Sunni Baathist army of Saddam Hussein. When they were expelled from Iraq during and years after our Iraq invasion in 2003, they became easy prey to recruit even though they have different goals and ideological differences with ISIS.
Your contention that there have been ongoing atrocities in the Middle East for centuries is unrelated to how ISIS grew their recruitments. They could not have mobilized without our invasion of Iraq that opened up a “brand new” Pandora’s Box. The foreign nationals our troops are assisting and training have been performing quite well.
Now for the truth-be-told part of this rebuttal. You wrongfully went along with the Republican Party line that turned out to be goulash. What really happened was that George Jr. went along with the Cheney-Libby false information Neo-Con program to achieve their goal of regime change by any means necessary. Their 2000 Project for the New American Century agenda claimed its purpose was to rebuild America’s defenses without making mention of the real goal of controlling most of the resources in several overseas countries.
We forgot to heed Jesus’s warnings about [the love of] money being the roof of all evil. They even outed Valerie Plame, CIA operative, after her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, came back with the report that Saddam did not try to purchase uranium in Niger. Their actions endangered dozens of other CIA operatives.
Colin Powell, Secretary of State under Bush, never jumped ship when he resigned. He left because of the mutineers on the ship who set him up like a dummy to make a speech to the United Nations televised around the world in February 2003 about alleged WMDs in Iraq. We invaded Iraq the following month.
In his 2012 book titled “It Worked For Me,” Powell “lamented,” in his chapter titled “Tell Me What You Know,” “… that there is nothing worse than a leader believing he has accurate information when folks who know that he doesn’t don’t tell him that he doesn’t.” He further advised “that no intelligence officials had the courage to warn him that he was handed false information to report to the world.” In street jargon, they call that “snitching.”
Finally, a Pew Research team disputed your findings by reporting that our world standing diminished a lot under Bush Jr. and also went down the last few years under Mr. Obama in Middle East countries. However, it is still good in most countries in Europe. The problem we had in the past was leading under false pretenses, in contrast to leading from behind.
Bill Clemens
Smyrna