U.S. Pulling Out Last Troops From Yemen

U.S. Pulling Last of Its Special Operations Forces Out of Yemen
from CNN:

Sanaa, Yemen (CNN)The U.S. military is in the process of evacuating about 100 Special Operations forces members from the Al Anad airbase in Yemen due to that country's deteriorating security situation, sources in the region familiar with the situation told CNN.

Those being evacuated are the last American troops stationed in the Arab nation, which is home to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist group also known as AQAP. The United States closed its embassy in Sanaa last month, after Houthi rebels took over the Yemeni capital. 

For years, the U.S. military has worked closely with Yemen's government to go after AQAP, together carrying out numerous attacks like the 2011 drone strike that killed prominent al Qaeda figure Anwar al-Awlaki. And U.S. President Barack Obama has hailed this cooperation as a pillar in his anti-terrorism campaign. 

"Yemen has never been a perfect democracy or a island of stability," Obama said in January, promoting the policy of "partnering and intelligence-sharing with that local government" as the best approach in a bad situation.

Read more: U.S. Pulling Last of Its Special Operations f\forces Out of Yemen

Barack Obama RETREATS from Yemen, successfully.....

Obama and his foreign policy failures created ISIS -

Barack Obama and ISIS ....


Barack Obama's foreign policy is one of appeasement, naivete and retreat. Otherwise known as FAILURE.

 The following article appeared in Politico on June 22,2014. While Barack Obama will never be held accountable for any malfeasance, malpractice or major miscalculations by the biased media, the sixth year into the Obama administration means Blaming Bush no longer works.  After 6 Years, the President cannot hide from HIS record and the current results of HIS actions and reactions /

The Man Who Broke the Middle East

By ELLIOTT ABRAMS

June 22, 2014

There’s always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story. But unfortunately for the Obama narratives, the president had about as much as to do with Tunisia’s turn toward democracy as he did with the World Cup rankings. Where administration policy has had an impact, the story is one of failure and danger.

The picture has been modified for editorial purposes  ..... 

The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.

How did it happen? Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam—knowledge “rooted in my own experience” because “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” But President Obama wasn’t speaking that day in an imaginary location called “the world of Islam;” he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power. “As a boy,” Obama told his listeners, “I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.” Nice touch, but Arab rulers were more interested in knowing whether as a man he heard the approaching sound of gunfire, saw the growing threat of al Qaeda from the Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula, and understood the ambitions of the ayatollahs as Iran moved closer and closer to a bomb. 

Obama began with the view that there was no issue in the Middle East more central than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Five years later he has lost the confidence of both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and watched his second secretary of state squander endless efforts in a doomed quest for a comprehensive peace. Obama embittered relations with America’s closest ally in the region and achieved nothing whatsoever in the “peace process.” The end result in the summer of 2014 is to see the Palestinian Authority turn to a deal with Hamas for new elections that—if they are held, which admittedly is unlikely—would usher the terrorist group into a power-sharing deal. This is not progress. 

The most populous Arab country is Egypt, where Obama stuck too long with Hosni Mubarak as the Arab Spring arrived, and then with the Army, and then the Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi, and now is embracing the Army again. Minor failings like the persecution of newspaper editors and leaders of American-backed NGOs, or the jailing of anyone critical of the powers-that-be at a given moment, were glossed over. When the Army removed an elected president, that was not really a “coup”—remember? And as the worm turned, we managed to offend every actor on Egypt’s political stage, from the military to the Islamists to the secular democratic activists. Who trusts us now on the Egyptian political scene? 

No one.

But these errors are minor when compared to those in Iraq and Syria. When the peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad was brutally crushed, Obama said Assad must go; when Assad used sarin gas, Obama said this was intolerable and crossed a red line. But behind these words there was no American power, and speeches are cheap in the Middle East. Despite the urgings of all his top advisers (using the term loosely; he seems to ignore their advice)—Panetta at CIA and then Defense, Clinton at State, Petraeus at CIA, even Dempsey at the Pentagon—the president refused to give meaningful assistance to the Syrian nationalist rebels. Assistance was announced in June 2013 and then again in June 2014 (in the president’s West Point speech) but it is a minimal effort, far too small to match the presence of Hezbollah and Iranian Quds Force fighters in Syria. Arabs see this as a proxy war with Iran, but in the White House the key desire is to put all those nasty Middle Eastern wars behind us. So in the Middle East American power became a mirage, something no one could find—something enemies did not fear and allies could not count on. 

The humanitarian result has been tragic: At least 160,000 killed in Syria, perhaps eight million displaced. More than a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon (a country of four million people, before Obama added those Syrians), about a million and a quarter Syrian refugees in Jordan (population six million before Obama). Poison gas back on the world scene as a tolerated weapon, with Assad using chlorine gas systematically in “barrel bombs” this year and paying no price whatsoever for this and for his repeated attacks on civilian targets. Both of the key officials handling Syria for Obama—State Department special envoy Fred Hof and Ambassador Robert Ford—resigned in disgust when they could no longer defend Obama’s hands-off policy. Can Samantha Power be far behind, watching the mass killings and seeing her president respond to them with rhetoric?  

The result in security terms is even worse: the largest gathering of jihadis we have ever seen, 12,000 now and expanding.They come from all over the world, a jihadi Arab League, a jihadi EU, a jihadi U.N. Two or three thousand are from Europe, and an estimated 70 from the United States. When they go home, some no doubt disillusioned but many committed, experienced and well trained, “home” will be Milwaukee and Manchester and Marseille—and, as we see now on the front pages, to Mosul. When Obama took office there was no such phenomenon; it is his creation, the result of his passivity in Syria while Sunnis were being slaughtered by the Assad regime.

Continue 
Read Page 2 at Politico Magazine 

Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. He served as a deputy national security adviser in the administration of George W. Bush.


Blame Bush for the Iraq War?  What about Bush implying that Iraq had WMDs?
Democrat and former president Bill Clinton will enlighten us in he next video.  

Other prominent Democrats held strong views about Iraq and WMD. Take A look (video below)

House Sets Limits on U.S. Military Involvement in Syria

On voice votes, House Sets limits on U.S. Military Involvement in Syria

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/07/24/5026692/on-voice-votes-house-sets-limits.html#storylink=cpy

By William Douglas and Hannah Allam

McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — With little argument, the House of Representatives approved measures Wednesday that would prevent the Obama administration from spending money on U.S. military operations in Syria without consulting Congress and would forbid funding U.S. military or paramilitary operations in Egypt.
The measures, part of the House’s $598 billion defense bill, were supposed to be contentious issues exposing bipartisan rifts between interventionists who want to give Obama a free hand in dealing with the civil war in Syria and unrest in Egypt and war-weary lawmakers concerned that U.S. troops will be dragged into more military actions.
But both amendments were approved on voice votes with only scant dissent.
On Syria, lawmakers passed an amendment by Rep. Trey Radel, R-Fla., that would forbid any military action in Syria if it violates the War Powers Resolution – which requires the president to consult Congress before committing U.S. forces to battle or placing them in situations where hostilities are imminent.
The Radel amendment does not address the contentious issue of providing weapons to the Syrian rebels, whose campaign to topple President Bashar Assad is made up of as many as 1,200 largely independent groups, including some that are openly affiliated with al Qaida. Congressional intelligence committees recently signed off on an Obama administration proposal to have the CIA funnel unspecified arms and training to rebels aligned with the moderate Supreme Military Council, led by a defected Syrian general, Salim Idriss.

But the wording of the amendment would apply to setting up a no-fly zone or using U.S. ships to launch attacks on sites in Syria, and the debate showed that deeper military involvement in Syria is opposed by an unusual House coalition of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.
“I believe without a shadow of a doubt this is one of the most insane policies that borders on madness – the United States to give funding, training and arms most likely to al Qaida in Syria doesn’t make any sense,” said Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. “This is absolute madness.”
Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., agreed, calling the situation in Syria “chaotic.”
“Distinguishing between the good rebels and the bad rebels is impossible,” Welch said on the House floor. “The notion that we can have a micromanaged approach and pick the good guys, and arm them, and not have any reasonable . . . expectation that the arms will get into bad hands I think is naive.”
Welch added that Congress has the responsibility to weigh in before U.S. troops are sent into harm’s way.
“We have a job to do under the Constitution,” he said.
The Obama administration last month notified Congress under the War Powers Resolution that a detachment of 700 U.S. troops who’d been participating in war games in Jordan would remain in that country “until the security situation becomes such that it is no longer needed.” The detachment includes Patriot anti-missile systems and fighter aircraft, the White House notification said.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/07/24/5026692/on-voice-votes-house-sets-limits.html#storylink=cpy

 Read More:
House sets limits on U.S. military involvement in Syria

@MSNBC - Inexplicable Propaganda

Steve Benen

Now an excerpt from another @MSNBC article not worth reading  Inexplicably renewing the OBL debate    
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"I continue to find this entire line of attack deeply strange. For one thing, Sununu is relying on an odd anti-Obama book that has struggled badly to stand up to scrutiny.

For another, Obama wasn't "timid on the first two or three opportunities." On the contrary, it was Donald Rumsfeld who called off missions to get bin Laden he considered too risky."

Concludes with.....

"But from a purely strategic perspective, what does Sununu hope to gain from resuming this fight? How does it help Romney to remind everyone that Obama took an enormous risk when he ordered the strike, but he made the tough call and it paid off?"

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 Now we examine the highlighted  sentence above and follow the link to called off missions  to get bin laden and what do we find?  The link points to AQ leadership and Bin Laden is NOT on the LIST. 
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But Glenn Thrush highlights another tidbit that seems important: six years ago, the U.S. was poised to launch a raid in Pakistan against al Qaeda, but Rumsfeld called it off. It was, he decided at the time, too risky.

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.
The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group's operations.
But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld.... Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

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The article is more than flawed and I just highlighted the most glaring example of an outright LIE.
@MSNBC cannot be considered a news outlet by any measure and the consumers of this pablum deserve ridicule and scorn.