Obama: GOP would have U.S. in '7 wars right now'
The president blasts his hawkish Republican critics in a little-noticed video released last month.
'I've been counting' »
GOP would have U.S. in ‘seven wars right now’
October 6, 2015
President Barack Obama likes to paint Republicans as warmongers
and portray himself as the diplomat-in-chief who ended the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, even though those conflicts continue and seem certain to outlast his time in office.
In
a little-noticed White House video released last month, Obama insisted
that he even knows exactly how many wars the United States would be in
if he had listened to his hawkish GOP critics.
“Right
now, if I was taking the advice of some of the members of Congress who
holler all the time, we’d be in, like, seven wars right now,” he told a
small group of veterans and Gold Star mothers of slain U.S. military
personnel.
“I’m not exaggerating. I’ve been counting. We’d be in military actions in seven places around the world,” he emphasized.
The
Sept. 10 meeting occurred behind closed doors in the White House
Roosevelt Room, but the president’s comments were made public in a White
House-produced video shared via social media.
Asked
by Yahoo News to substantiate Obama’s remarks, a National Security
Council spokesman first listed seven places to which the president has
sent combat forces on a range of missions: Syria, Iraq, Pakistan,
Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen.
Indeed, part of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal sales pitch hinged on his willingness to use deadly force overseas, intervening around the world far more aggressively than his critics say he’s willing to.
But
that was plainly not what the president was talking about last month
when he insisted that he was not exaggerating and had been counting how
many additional conflicts Republicans wanted the U.S. to be engaged in.
“The
point is that some of our critics think massive ground forces are the
answer to any security challenge anywhere in the world for undefined
ends,” NSC spokesman Ned Price told Yahoo News. “Our response has been
to deploy boots on the ground for discrete missions when necessary for
pre-defined and narrow purposes.”
He did not share Obama’s list of supposed GOP-sought conflicts.
That’s not to say that key Republicans are less hawkish than the president. Far from it: They’ve called for U.S. ground troops to carry out combat missions in Iraq,
for more aggressive military action in Syria, for Washington to provide
lethal aid to Ukraine’s military as it clashes with Russian-backed
separatists and for Obama to send warships to the South China Sea as a
counter to Beijing’s expansive territorial claims.
Nor
is Obama alone in escalating the partisan rhetoric in Washington, D.C.,
and being dismissive of opponents. The verbal battle over the nuclear
agreement between six world powers and Iran included GOP portrayals of
Obama as the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism, or as an accomplice to a
new Holocaust.
Still,
Obama’s comments suggest that the president — who has never hesitated
to clash verbally with his critics — is planning to stay in “rhymes-with-bucket list” mode, as he has described himself, for his last year and a half in the White House.
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