[politics] Sharpie Man - How does it feel to be an American under an insecure president?
- Thread starter bluegate
- Start date
Ok. This is where we need to take a step back.Eacaraxe said:
First, I think it will help us all if you post all of the documents that you have pertaining to the intel Obama had when he decided to use the drone strikes. Let's all take a look at it so we can attempt to come to the same conclusion.
I said that passive aggressive remark to remind you, myself, and everyone reading that we don't freaking know what people are telling our Leaders at any given moment. Our presidents are picked from congressmen, actors, and yes, sometimes even reality tv stars. They have to trust the info they are given because they HAVE TO. They don't have the Ground Intelligence to know what smells wrong. They don't have Professor X psychic ability to read the minds of everyone to know who is on the up and up. If sandwich shops close because there isn't good interplay and trust between bosses, employees, and suppliers, you can only imagine how bad it would be for someone trying to run a country.
I will never be ok with civilian causalities. I hate the idea of it. No one should die because they just had the misfortune of being near someone who's attempting to take on someone infinitely bigger than them. More to the point, someone reported that there IS someone near those innocent civilians that someone is attempting to take on someone infinitely bigger than them.
Second, Warfare is ever evolving, sadly. I already stated before, sometimes you have to 'let it slip' what you're packing to make people think about stepping off. It's been done with every president that I've seen in my life. As well as civilian lost of life due to these things. From Reagan [https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/15/reagan-bomb-libya-april-15-1986-1272788], to Bush [https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/the-ignored-legacy-of-george-h-w-bush-war-crimes-racism-and-obstruction-of-justice/], to Clinton [http://jimbovard.com/blog/2019/03/25/20-years-ago-bill-clinton-bombs-serbia-killing-hundreds-of-civilians/], To new Bush [https://www.salon.com/2018/03/19/the-staggering-death-toll-in-iraq_partner/], to Obama [https://archives.cjr.org/feature/covering_obamas_secret_war.php], and now Trump [https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-donald-trump-drone-strikes-far-exceed-obama-s-numbers]. They show their force, and innocent people get killed.
It's always just a matter of how they do it. Drone Strikes to me aren't as better or worse than F-111 bombers because frankly, that's beyond any civilian to get their hands on.
And you're arguing on legality cuts to the point if there truly is a NIAC [https://www.unodc.org/e4j/en/terrorism/module-6/key-issues/categorization-of-armed-conflict.html] happening or not.
The amount of skirmishes, bombings, and radicalized attacks in ISIS's name durinng Obama's tenure will have to be discussed for some time. A response was needed. A full army inclusion doesn't seem to fit the bill, but what do I know. I'm not in the military. I don't have military advisers. And I don't have access to the US armament. Neither does anyone on this forum.
Obama is a President. This doesn't excuse the actions that took the lives of innocent civilians. It doesn't make light of the human cost of these showings of power. But the simple fact that these deaths were carried out by drones does not make it better or worse. A terrorist group doesn't file formal papers of war with the UN. You fight unconventional wars unconventionally. Again, it doesn't make it better... it's still armed conflicts.
I get that, you can't say someone is bad then because their policies from then don't work now, but I think hindsight can be applied to better determine if those policies worked in the first place. Particularly the foreign policies. The League of Nations failed to preserve the peace, World War II definitely happened anyway. Then it gets credit for being the the model for the UN we still have today, but the UN has sort of always been a joke as far as efficacy. But it takes a long time to understand that. And like, it takes decades before the backlash of overseas intervention really hits, "it worked well for the US at that moment in time" cannot be used to judge policies that laid the groundwork for both the Vietnam War and the turmoil south of the border still ongoing to this day.Agema said:
He set up the Federal Reserve, which sucked at it's job for decades before doing anything worthwhile. It took a couple of the most painful depressions in history before they figured anything out. But I'll allow for that, sometimes the right idea takes time to start reaping rewards.
It's silly to credit Woodrow Wilson for progressive income taxes. The debate on that was ongoing for decades before he was in office, and the 16th amendment was ratified to allow income taxes before Wilson was in office, and it was passed with the express purpose of being progressive as tariffs and excise taxes were (are) viewed as burdensome on the poor. It by coincidence of timing that Wilson happened to be the one to sign the income tax, every candidate in 1912 would have signed income taxes into law.
And I would hesitate to applaud the labor positions of a New Jersey politician in the era of political machine politics. It may seem noble to side with mistreated workers against the wealthy, but when Wilson was ready to send federal troops to end a labor dispute, I doubt the target being named Rockefeller wasn't part of the calculation.
But to get back out of the weeds, I'm just saying we should judge presidencies by their long term effects as well. Anyone who's ever felt reason to complain about the US being the policeman of the world can trace that right back to Wilson.
Edit: I'd hardly call Wilson the worst president, there are certainly people who simultaneously did little and did bad things. But I think when you can look back and go "yeah, that wasn't great", it's not right to give a huge advantage over Presidents who kept things ticking along.
Has the UN been a joke? How does anyone know - where's the comparison with a world that never had a UN? For all we know wide swathes of the world could be an irradiated wasteland were it not for the UN.tstorm823 said:
What about the World Health Organisation? World Bank and IMF? UNESCO? It's interrelations with the WTO? It's maritime and aviation bodies? Not to say these are all necessarily perfect and controversy-free, but are we really to say they don't matter? I think people call the UN a joke because it sometimes fails to stop wars or its peacekeeping missions don't work because they're very high profile. But I don't think people consider all the ways the UN might be much more quietly minimising conflicts, nor do they think about (as per the above) the enormous mass of international co-operation it works on in all spheres of human endeavour.
No, it's not silly: he did it. Even if just joining the dots, the person that gets it done gets the credit. People get Nobel Prizes for science not necessarily for brilliant leaps of intuition, but just because they happened to be the first person to add 2 and 2 and get 4 on a big subject matter. Also, there's the possibility that had another candidate won, they might not have done it, because maybe they were leaned on, would have caved, would have screwed something up, etc.
Again, what does this matter? He did it, and other politicians didn't. Even if his motives may not have been entirely altruistic, it's his achievement and his credit.
The USA was (/is) the policeman of the world because it benefitted the USA. As was Britain in it's day, and every other major power since the dawn of time. That's because countries are interrelated, and the top dogs have a vested interest in ensuring that the wider system of activity in their region work for their benefit. The world where the USA was not the global policeman is a world where all sorts of nations started operating to someone else's benefit rather than the USA. Thrown their lot in with the USSR or China, or maybe the UK and France maintained their empires, or maybe all the US companies were expelled from Brazil, and their goods and profits went elsewhere, and so on.
'Everything before but is a bunch of bullshit'.Eacaraxe said:
Legal war? What is a legal war? What does legality have to do with it? If we are going to argue morality, right and wrong, then it doesnt matter whether or not it is 'legal'.
But this argument has had its goalposts moved so far its not even on the field anymore.
My point is, Obama is one of the best presidents ever. Its not Obama's fault that the competition is crap. So we can either be realistic and realize that shitting on Obama is only going to hold us back and give us more people like Trump, or we can try to raise the bar, even if it is only by a little amount, because that is better than kicking the bar to the floor.
You dont get better by making everything worse.
Look, an Obama supporter saying this to defend Obama makes this no less repulsive than a Bush supporter saying it to defend Bush...because this is all shit I heard for eight years before Obama took office, and it's actually the same shit Obama himself decried right up until the moment he took the oath of office. It's the same logic that brought us Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and almost certainly in the near future, Iran. It's the same logic that brought us the PATRIOT Act, the original "war on terror" AUMF, their subsequent expansions, Guano bay, Abu Ghraib, and dozens if not hundreds of interconnected issues, scandals, controversies, and atrocities of which drone strikes are ultimately a small footnote. I don't care that a sitting POTUS was a Democrat, I care he not only did nothing to put the brakes on it, but rather he expanded it and made it less transparent and justiciable -- all in time enough someone like Trump now holds those cards.ObsidianJones said:
The Obama administration changed the definitions of enemy combatant and associated forces specifically to hide the number of civilian casualties during drone strikes, by defining every military-aged male within the AO as a combatant until proven otherwise. The Obama administration punted on the issue of torture by pegging intelligence agencies' authorized methods to the Army Field Manual, but never mind the AFM's definitions and list of prohibited methods are woefully inadequate, something that has been latched onto to continue justifying torture.
Here's the core issue with what you have to say: asymmetric warfare, nor the strategic logic behind asymmetric warfare, nor hegemonic powers' inability to cope with asymmetric warfare, hasn't fundamentally changed since Hebrew zealots were shanking Roman soldiers and bureaucrats in Roman-occupied Judea. The only things that have, are tools, language, and the various layers of bullshit the state packs on to manufacture consent. The bottom line is, the US government has to make a decision: ethnically cleanse the local populace or get the fuck out. That's a lesson we learned the hard way in Vietnam, it only took the country 26 years to forget it, and the past twenty years of indecisiveness have fiscally and ethically bankrupted the country.
Obviously, I'm on Team GTFO.
Now, here's the secondary issue: you claim "...we don't freaking know what people are telling our Leaders at any given moment". This is all too true...and the complete lack of transparency or accountability on the part of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies is a huge fucking problem. To what we can point, is a seventy-year history that begins with "the contemporary intelligence community was created by Nazi sympathizers, apologists, and profiteers". A rather ironic shade, considering we're comparing and contrasting the morality of our current armed conflicts to WWII, if I do say so myself.
The oil man was a key figure in the '53 Iran coup. A guy who had stock in, and was on the board of, National Fruit was behind the Guatemala coup. Our intelligence community was behind coups across Latin America, that installed and supported some of the worst human rights abusers in history since Hitler. Our intelligence community armed, supported, and trained death squads in Latin America and the Middle East. We created al-Qaeda, and made bin Laden the man he was, in the first place. Our intelligence community fabricated the claims and evidence that justified Iraq in the first place.
This never ended. Look at Honduras in '09, and Venezuela today. Hell, you want to talk about Syria and ISIS; we kicked that shit off during the "Arab spring", then proceeded to fund and support al-Qaeda against the monster we created and were also materially supporting for years until NYT caught the Obama administration red-handed and blew the whistle on the whole thing. Same fuckin' story with the Saudi arms trade and Yemen; the Obama admin was entirely happy with it until they got caught. And this is the same President who oversaw the end of decades' worth of prohibition against the broadcast of state-funded and -crafted propaganda to American citizens, and created a slush fund for news organizations for that very purpose.
Clearly, we are not dealing with good-faith actors here.
What more do you need before you have a "Hans, are we the baddies" moment? The guy who blew the whistle on an unprecedented, automated, warrantless surveillance network on American citizens, the full scope and scale of which previously thought to be the exclusive purview of Orwell, Bradbury, or Heinlein novels, had to seek political asylum in Russia. The website curator who blew the whistle on American war crimes in Iraq, lived for seven years as a fugitive from falsified rape charges in an apartment in an Ecuadorian embassy. The Marine who worked with Assange to whistle blow on those war crimes, spent the remainder of Obama's terms in a brig, and apparently Obama had to be pressured into commuting her sentence, not even granting a full pardon.
There's a saying: when a manager with a great reputation takes over a team with a terrible reputation, it's the team's reputation that survives.Eacaraxe said:
A government, like any large organisation, is a massive institutional force with incredible inertia - the inertia of countless departments staffed by civil servants and agents etc. with their way of doing things, whose opinions and actions inform the decisions of those higher up. It's full of people with their own powers and vested interests that may be extremely hard to shift, no matter who takes over. The institution is often more powerful than the person at the top, and accomplishing change is consequently extremely hard.
Some believe (like grey eminences in the current British government) that crises are valuable, because they provide the impetus to overcome the usual inertia. One of the key advisors to Downing Street, Dominic Cummings, thinks the entire British political system - parliament and civil service - needs to be basically destroyed and rebuilt. Think now about the context of a "No Deal" Brexit likely to do severe harm to the country that the government is clearly angling at.
This is how we need to consider presidents: often perhaps people a bit like train drivers. Sure, they have all sorts of powers and decisions they can make, but fundamentally they're still stuck on a railroad.
You know for some reason I thought the British Secret Service was a lot older than that. More you know I guess.Eacaraxe said:
In terms of a formal government / military department specifically for collecting intelligence, I believe the UK secret service effectively dates back to about 1880 and really took off in WWI. Although obviously there have been about a zillion new creations, mergers, demergers, name changes and so on of intelligence departments along the way to today.Gordon_4 said:
The CIA is about 70 years old: I'm not aware the USA had any real equivalent to the British secret service before then, although there were obviously varied intelligence agencies of some sort around.
I hope you didn't consider what I said supporting the actions.Eacaraxe said:
After I condemned such action numerous times... even in the paragraph which you quoted me.
I don't believe anyone knows what is awaiting them as President. Or any position of power. That's why I personally will do anything I can do to avoid them because I don't want to end up compromising my morals for what's "the greater good".
I believe every position of power does this. That's not an excuse. That comes with the territory. It doesn't make it any better in my eyes, but I do insist on not getting bombed or killed myself, so a lot of the time it feels like a trade-off that I have to reluctantly go along with. And yes, I do remember being afraid of going towards Manhattan after the towers fell. I remember not going to college being afraid of it. And God know I remember calling my brother and trying to get in touch with my family feverishly, trying to make sure no one was near the towers at the time.
My brother was, by the way. Turns out the studio he was learning Sound Engineering was a few blocks away and they decided to go get lunch out of their way. Fun times.
Why do I bring up 9/11? Because we get to talk about the our hand in helping to form the Mujahideen that will eventually turn its sights on us [https://www.globalresearch.ca/sleeping-with-the-devil-how-u-s-and-saudi-backing-of-al-qaeda-led-to-911/5303313]. We gave them the funding. We gave them the guns. But we didn't make them actual allies. We couldn't, as we were a perfect target for the new enemy.
Now, what was Obama supposed to do? Say "hey, that was the other guys, but we're cool right"? To be clear again, I don't think every bit of intel that Obama might have based his decisions on were stellar. Some might have been faulty fact gathering, CIs just giving BS information for whatever reason, or just a war monger with an Axe to grind. Was Obama supposed to know that? The Bushes? Reagan? Clinton?
How are you supposed to give these facts to a civilian and expect them to know if this is good intel or bad? That this smells right but that smells bad?
Well.. ok, that excuse holds firm for Trump, Obama, and Clinton as they were never in the military. Reagan and the Bushes served. But even then, the First Bush was the only one who really fought in a war. My point isn't to defend. Nor is it to excuse. But if a trusted member of your intelligence community comes in with information, pictures, and reports about movements of people who are orchestrating mayhem against you, you act on it. Because you're damned either way.
You're either wrong and you look like a war monger, not to mention having to go to sleep every night knowing that you signed the order that killed innocent people. Or you didn't follow through and an attack came from that very source. And you have to go to sleep every night knowing you had the chance and you didn't take it, and you failed the American people.
Like most positions of power, the job of President is full of mitigating disasters. We can GTFO all we please. But that won't stop people who are convinced we all combatants for some reason or another. Nor will the rest of the international community look kindly on extermination tactics. And frankly, I wouldn't either. That's civil war type stuff. That the people who are in charge of this country are sick and need to be forced out by its own people.
However. Every president coming in will forever be in this very no win scenario. We should NEVER consider mass murder "just to be sure". Likewise, there will be people who will continue to gun for us there who will not listen to reason. And there will be faults in intelligence. And War mongers. And lies. And people being fed wrong intel to make us bomb innocents to ruin us in the political sphere.
This will not go away. And this will not be the 46th presidents doing, the 47th, and on down. This is now the new normal. As it's been the same for many other countries. India's and Pakistan's beef which I would say was defined in the modern era during the 1947 Kashmir Conflict is still be felt to this day. Literally to this day [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-49737886].
I'll never be a hundred percent on board with these actions between US and factions in the middle east. But understanding why the President feels compelled to action after this country's history and numerous conflicts (bombings and the like) is a far cry from condoning. Something can make sense to you and you can even get why it is done, and still you don't have to agree with it.
No, but you're engaging in apologetics for it despite decrying it, so yeah, I'm going to consider your position adversarial and argue with it from that perspective.ObsidianJones said:
That said, I certainly empathize that 9/11 was a traumatic event for you, but what you need to acknowledge is the strategic logic behind the act. Bin Laden's and AQ's stated objectives were to draw the US into the Afghan trap, just as the US did to the Soviet Union in '79. Bin Laden was not stupid; in fact, the way I see it he's one of the most brilliant strategists of the 21st Century thus far, and certainly more competent than anything the West has produced since WWII. He planned on the US to resort to gross, raw emotional, overreaction -- and the US did, vastly beyond bin Laden's wildest dreams I'd bet.
The Mujahideen wasn't even an enemy of the US until the Gulf war -- because they, unlike the American populace, knew the truth of that war and its potential ramifications. Kuwait screwed Iraq out of the money the former owed the latter from the Iran-Iraq war and started slant drilling Iraqi oil, and Hussein was actually defending his country's economy (because the war tanked the Iraqi economy, and they were dependent upon those Kuwaiti payments) and resources by invading Kuwait. The Gulf states, who perceived Iraq as a competitor on the oil market, paid off the US to knock out the competition and stick around in case it happened again (see also, Yemen) -- and this is all after the Gulf states sided with the West to violate OPEC production quotas for nearly a decade.
At the end of the day, 9/11 among other actions were blowback for decades' worth of brazen, military and covert, interference in other countries' business to serve (corporate) American interests. Hence, the symbolism behind attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when the reality is on that day bin Laden and his executors had his pick of practically any target on the eastern seaboard, any number of which had greater significance to American democracy or history, or Western modernity in general. "More of the same that led to the 9/11 attacks" is not a winning strategy, whether it's in the scope or scale of the Iraq invasion, all the way down to a single drone strike.
I know damn well you haven't forgotten this, but let's add a little perspective to this discussion. You're orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by a cop than a radical Islamist. Fifty years of "the war on drugs" and now "the war on terrorism" have seen to that by way of rapid, paradigmatic, expansion and normalization of police powers, mission creep, and militarization. If you can't see the connectivity between those things, you're not paying attention -- the correlation between American foreign policy interference, the drug trade (legal and illicit), and violent criminality up to and including terrorism, is pretty absolute. Four decades ago, it was Latin American cocaine; today, it's south Asian opiates.
We're not just talking about some asshole eight thousand miles away taking a Hellfire missile up the ass. We're not even just talking about the people who survive that Hellfire missile, but lose everything they had and decide to strap on a bomb vest or join an insurgency group five or ten years down the road. We're also talking about the lies we tell ourselves to make shit like stop-and-frisk, or cops packing heat exclusively intended for military use and being told on the regular an everyday stop could turn into the OK Corral at the drop of a hat, an easy pill to swallow.
That segue over, I hope the picture I'm about to paint should be clear. You brought up the Bushes, both of whose administrations lied through their eyeteeth to involve the US in Iraq. The first time being the point of fracture that led to 9/11. What was Obama supposed to do? I'd like to think, exactly what Kennedy did -- treat known liars acting on behalf of interests contrary to the long-term peace and prosperity of the country, for who and what they were, and at least make some semblance of attempt to return the country to sanity.
Considering the former was a DoD directive that came from the Oval Office, and the latter was an executive order?Kwak said:
I'll actually respond to everything else once we touch base.Eacaraxe said:
This is feeling reminiscent of other conversations I've had on this forum where it was evident that I was a placeholder for a general side which one wanted to argue. So, I'd like to clear it up before actually trying to engage.
Are you actually not seeing what I'm saying, or do you actually believe I'm apologizing.
The word I use is condemn. Because I condemn it. Absolutely. My point is that all presidents do this crap.
Once again. In Bolded letters.
I Do Not Support This. I Wish It Didn't Happen. And I Abhor The Practices That Continue These Senseless Killings Of Innocents.
Obama isn't off the hook because I generally like his other policies. He's on the hook with the others because they ALL did things I would consider bad and I know I personally couldn't live with. To me, it's like a doctor. I literally stopped studying for my MCAT when a family friend told me that it wasn't a matter of if I would kill someone, but when and how many [https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2019/02/every-physician-will-kill-a-patient.html]. He told me that it's apart of the job.
I stopped all my plans because I couldn't live with knowing an innocent person's blood was on my hands. Whether or not that holds true (exceptions to every rule), I realize a big part of defending this nation and it's interest (even though its interests aren't always on the up and up) will be done by Military decisions and actions. That's a part of every president's life. I don't judge him as worse or better in this case because I don't have any evidence that he carry those duties out callously or without thought of the ramifications of his actions.
Every President has innocent Blood on his hands. It's not a fact I'm proud of or even ok with. But I understand it as a fact.
First, no problem. Curiosity never is. That said, Obama's decision continues the overall trend, but as an action of its own it's actually an extremely dramatic expansion to the involved working definitions. Understanding how really requires parsing the language for minutiae, and considering it in the bigger context. Skipping Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, and Japanese internment during WWII, the Bush admin revived the term "unlawful enemy combatant" with a fiery passion.Kwak said:
The administration's intent being, to indefinitely detain foreign nationals suspected of terrorism and try them in military tribunal, but circumvent the Geneva Conventions' restrictions on the detention and treatment of prisoners of war and spies. In essence, having their cake and eat it too especially when it came to the Gestapo shit our troops and intelligence community was pulling overseas. SCOTUS shot that shit down, between Hamdi, Hamdan, Boumediene, and Rasul.
To the Obama administration's credit, they at least admitted this was the government's intent and abandoned the term, even if the Executive branch's standing position would go on to be "fuck you, we're doing it anyways". Then the other shoe dropped, and the Obama administration realized dead people don't file habeas corpus suits. The landscape shifted from "detain them, but they're entitled to due process" to "kill 'em all and let the courts sort it out".
That's fine and I understand your position, but at the end of the day we're not arguing the same point.ObsidianJones said:
You're trying to argue Obama may or may not have had information we didn't, and was acting in accordance to the best-possible courses of action to mitigate overall harm. That's understandable.
I'm arguing whatever information Obama may or may not have had, came from unreliable sources with a known, provable, track record of malfeasance that goes back to the end of the second World War, whose very malfeasance is the root cause for the problems in which we find ourselves today. And, even if those sources are acting in good faith which I personally find impossibly likely, they derive their information from means known, and proven, to be ineffective and yield inaccurate information. And, even if that information is accurate which I personally find impossibly likely, Obama's choice was to embrace tactics he, as a civil rights activist and Constitutional scholar, spent four years across various campaign trails and on the Senate floor laying out the case for their illegality, immorality, and irrationality.
Respectfully, I reject your premise Obama was acting in good faith, doing the best he could with the circumstances he was given. For eight years he was the goddamn Commander-in-Chief of the mightiest military force in human history. He didn't answer to the fucking intelligence community, they answered to him -- or at least, that's the way it's supposed to be. It was eminently in his power to at least pay lip service to the principles he spent four years arguing in the name of getting to the Oval Office.
At the end of the day, at least Bush didn't try to hide who he really worked for. He even named one of them VP. The one good thing I could at least say about him, is at least he had the good sense to not choke to death on that fucking pretzel, or else this country really would have been fucked.
Cool, thanks for clearing that up.Eacaraxe said:
... Although I am confused if we're not arguing the same thing, how do we proceed with the conversation?
I mean, I admit wholeheartedly that I do not know Obama's reasoning for anything he has done. And if I found out that he took innocent lives callowly, toss into the bin with the other despots. Any positive feelings are gone at that point.
But my premise isn't that Obama was acting in Good Faith. My premise is that every president has to deal with a myriad of different information, political grandstanding, and wrap that up with the safety of this country's interest and his own agenda. I do not know what was presented to him or any other president. I don't and won't know how he interpreted that information. None of us will. Including you.
Dislike him all you want. Hell, go as far as present your reasoning for feeling that way. My only real point is that even if we did see your evidence and Obama indeed handled his power like a ogre with a club, I'm assured that if we did the same for all presidents, lowballing 70% did similar things.
I'll hold them equally in contempt. But I still think that's a part of this international pissing match that requires a deranged mind to want to be apart of which we call 'Politics'
So... are we back to Saelune's question? Is Obama really worse than most other presidents? Because, despite all his badness, he didn't invade a country or send in operators to take down a president. Just about every president in the last 50 years has done that.ObsidianJones said:
So, as far as I'm aware, he cleared the air, jammed transmissions, took out Libyan missles targeting rebels and did some airstrikes against the Libyan armyAgema said:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/17/obama-destroyed-libya%3famp
He also states that he did this wrong and should have sent in ground forces to overwhelm him. Which... is more of a Bush move. (Also, wrong lesson Obama.) He also didn't assassinate him, which is a Reagan move. He allowed a civil war to happen, and stopped the army from immediately overwhelming the rebels.
This isn't good. It also isn't an invasion or assassination. With the airstrikes being a... IDK... incursion?