I found an article on Politico that I thought might be worth sharing:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ml?hp=pm_1
Obama’s view was that Al Qaeda was holed up in the badlands of Pakistan and you could drone it into submission. Then, if you stopped stirring up hornets’ nests in the Middle East, and demonstrated your good intentions, and pulled entirely out of Iraq and stayed out of Syria, you could focus on “nation building at home”? and not worry about places like Mosul and Aleppo.
This, in a nutshell, was the theory of the “don’t do stupid stuff”? doctrine.
Every particular was wrong.
Al Qaeda is part of a worldwide ideological movement. You could decimate its “core”? in Pakistan, but it would roll on elsewhere.
Whatever we do, the hornets in the Middle East are plentiful and nasty, and hate us just as much.
Our good intentions, as Obama defines them, got us nothing. We elected a president with the middle name of Hussein who did all he could to liquidate George W. Bush’s foreign policy and made outreach to the Muslim world one of his top priorities — yet the terror threat has grown.
We pulled out of Iraq and assiduously stayed out of Syria, and now there is a caliphate stretching across the border that, in the words of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, represents “an imminent threat to every interest we have.”?
[...]
It is not that the latest events in Iraq and Syria necessarily vindicate a rigorously McCainite foreign policy. You can believe ISIL must be defeated and still think that the Iraq War was a mistake and McCain and his allies are too recklessly interventionist.
But events have vindicated the surge that devastated the forerunner of ISIL and demonstrated the folly of Obama’s total pullout from Iraq, the point at which the country began its downward slide.
[...]
The political worm has turned so completely that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who the day before yesterday was scolding interventionists for their simple-mindedness, now evidently supports war in Iraq and Syria. He told The Associated Press that as president he would seek “congressional authorization to destroy [ISIL] militarily.”?
