White House, Lacking Military Experience, Commands With Negligent Goals, Strategy and Tactics

[From article]
Barack Obama, the president with the least understanding of military affairs of any on record, is fighting this as a limited war, a war of “containment” with no overall strategy of the moment, much less any kind of grand strategy for the long run. Obama, along with his various Middle East “experts” of the Susan Rice and Samantha Power variety, persists in stumbling from crisis to crisis, never accomplishing much, never looking forward to the next move, forever playing catchup ball. The end result has been political chaos, humanitarian disaster, and a revival of Jihadi fortunes throughout the Islamic crescent.
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An ignorant and easily-led public expecting instant results was not adequately prepared for a lengthy, grueling struggle against a canny and fanatical enemy, and soon lost patience.
The Democrats, always ready to take advantage of anything at all, no matter what the risk or cost to national security or the actual interests of the people, proved more than willing to exploit this in 2008.
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An apparent attempt at an end run around the entire problem was made through the “Arab Spring,” an effort to “democratize” the Middle East which ended in absolute disaster. We know very little about the details behind this effort (Benghazi is only the upper part of the iceberg), our honest media having absolutely refused to look into it.
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Nobody trusts a United States run by Obama, Kerry, and Hagel. Would you?
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The future progression is easy to predict. This is a Vietnam strategy, produced the same way that the Vietnam War was produced -- through less-than-competent individuals overthinking the situation in attempts to account for every last variable before ever making a move.
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So the first phase of the war, under Bush, was a success on its own terms. The second, under Obama, is a disaster of near-apocalyptic proportions. Tens of thousands have already died, millions will join them, possibly no small number of them on the streets of American cities.
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World War II is the American model: the country gearing up as a whole for a swift, overwhelming effort to destroy three evil and menacing empires. The war lasted roughly three-and-a-half years and ended with the total destruction of the enemy and the near-universal punishment of the aggressors.
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every Islamist is his own death camp commander, ready to commit unimaginable atrocities for any reason or none. While the Communists avoided direct strikes against the West, the Jihadis yearn for such actions.
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Many such strikes (Fort Hood, Times Square, Boston, Tulsa) have occurred under the Obama dispensation. These will only increase to a point where they can no longer be swept under the rug by a corrupt government and complicit media.
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There are a billion-plus Muslims currently active. If 1% are convinced fanatic Jihadis, that translates into somehting in the range of ten to twelve million. Which means that we need to kill a large portion of that ten to twelve million. As William T. Sherman put it repeatedly during the Civil War, the Confederate war effort was dependent on 300,000 Southern aristocrats -- slaveholders with influence over poorer and less educated Southerners. Once those 300,000 were killed, the war would end. This Sherman and Grant set out to do.
It took Lincoln and his cabinet over three years to face this fact. This was impossible for Obama (and for that matter, Bush). In the ultra-civilized, not to say effete 21st century, this will not occur until the U.S. has suffered far greater injuries than it has. The left will play the terror conflict the same way they did the Cold War. Obama has set the pattern and they will follow it.
We have a people whose mental horizons are set by sports, entertainment trivia, and reality TV. People who want no more than to retreat to their mancaves, malls, and game consoles and not be bothered. They are easily played and manipulated by anybody who is willing to promise exactly that.
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Without will, strategy is pantomime.
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There is no one on the political horizon that can shape this vision. Fortunately, democracies have a tendency to produce such figures (Pericles, Churchill, Truman, Reagan). But only when the chips are down. They’ve scarcely even started falling yet.

http://americanthinker.com/2014/10/our_hundred_years_war.html

October 21, 2014
Our Hundred Years' War
By J.R. Dunn