In a cruel echo of history, Obama is morphing into the president whose foreign policy he campaigned to overturn. Obama on Monday morning sacked his Pentagon secretary, Chuck Hagel, after huge midterm election losses in the sixth year of his presidency — just as Bush did in sacking Donald Rumsfeld after midterm losses in the sixth year of his presidency.
As with Bush, the ouster comes as a war in the Middle East is going badly — then, the Iraq war, now, the bombing of the Islamic State terror group. Rumsfeld’s ouster led to the surge in Iraq, and Hagel’s departure comes amid signs of an expanded role for U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. And, as under Bush, this guarantees that Obama will leave his successor an ongoing U.S. war in the Mideast — quite possibly the sort of ground war Obama vowed to undo.
The neo-cons who dominated the Bush administration feel some vindication watching Obama struggle to avoid repeating history. Dov Zakheim, a Bush-era Pentagon official, said Hagel was offered up as a “sacrificial lamb” by a White House trying to stall further escalation in Syria and Iraq. But “I just don’t think they have that luxury” of avoiding an expanded U.S. role, he said. “They’ll agonize as long as they possibly can, but the clock is ticking a lot faster than they anticipated.”
What you can clearly distill from this WP piece is that, as far-left as Obama has governed, they would like to see Obama move even further left.
And they seem genuinely annoyed that Obama is actually doing
even token action to preserve, protect and defend the United States. They would prefer that he just continue to deny reality and not do anything to resist the aggression and further threats of ISIS, Iran, Russia and China.
I think it's clear that Obama is only doing the minimum he is because to do less would cause him to further lose even the remaining political support among leadership in his own party.
