The Incompetent Always Blame Someone Else For Their Own Failures

The Obama deflection

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Bob LivingstonViews: 466

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In an interview with US magazine, President Barack Obama is laying blame for what he calls the Libyan “shit show” on failures of America’s European allies, singling out specifically British Prime Minister David Cameron and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Obama was especially critical of Cameron, claiming the British PM had taken his eye off Libya after being “distracted by a range of other things.”

“When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong… there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” Obama said.

That’s all grand. Except it ain’t so. In a NATO assessment of its conduct during the destruction of Libya (which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocents dead and wounded and displaced and created the cauldron from which ISIS spawned), one of the organization’s main criticisms was that it “overly relied on the United States.”

According to the The New York Times:

The report concluded that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.

The findings undercut the idea that the intervention was a model operation and that NATO could effectively carry out a more complicated campaign in Syria without relying disproportionately on the United States military. Even with the American help in Libya, NATO had only about 40 percent of the aircraft needed to intercept electronic communications, a shortage that hindered the operation’s effectiveness, the report said.

And:

The report also spotlights an important issue for the alliance that dates to the Balkan wars of the 1990s: that the United States has emerged “by default” as the NATO specialist in providing precision-guided munitions — which made up virtually all of the 7,700 bombs and missiles dropped or fired on Libya — and a vast majority of specialized aircraft that conduct aerial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, or I.S.R. in military parlance.

Now Obama’s trying to distance himself from yet another of his many foreign policy failures (are there any Obama foreign policy successes?) by throwing the U.S.’s chief allies in Middle Eastern wars of adventurism and regime change under the bus.

Obama told US:

We actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1bn – which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.

Funny, during one of the Democrat debates, the Witch from Chappaqua claimed Libya as an example of a successful use of “soft power.”

Editor’s Note: The magazine Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece for the globalists Council on Foreign Relations, blames the Libya debacle on Obama, not Cameron or Sarkozy. — BL.