- Joined
- Apr 12, 2005
- Messages
- 4,767
- Reaction score
- 697
Well, they have far, far less influence today then they have been in decades. Really, their golden age was the Bush administration and even then it was mostly in the first 5 or 6 years, Bush finally caught on and started sidelining Cheney in the end (and no invasion in Iran or Syria ensued). There are other groups that have filled that void. The proof is in the pudding really, Obama has been consistently doing the opposite of what the neo-cons have been publicly advocating. And I have to say that Obama has for the most part out smarted them. No matter what happens in Ukraine or Iraq, if no Americans get killed then Americans are far more likely to forget about any mistakes he makes. In other words, Americans have a harder time forgiving costly mistakes which is why the neo-cons will suffer for some time to come, regardless of who the next president will be. And to be honest, I think history will show Obama to be making the right choices. I think the soft power he's applying against Russia may in fact save Ukraine even if it does slip into a full scale civil war for some time. And the more I think about Iraq the more I tend to agree that he should be very cautious of appearing to come to the aid of the Shia majority. The neo-cons have, and always have had, Iraq all wrong and a complex problem has no easy solutions. Obama is showing that he's far more cerebral than the last 5 or 6 presidents. The Sunnis need to feel they are part of the nation but the shia have been essentially oppressing them for some time now. Like in Syria, this isn't the first time the Sunnis have revolted and even if Obama were to squash this uprising with military action, the Sunnis will eventually rise up again. The Sunnis have turned on ISIS in the past, Obama's best bet would be to convince them to do so again. The neo-cons would ignore all that and focus only on ISIS and dealing with them unilaterally which would be a grave mistake. Cheney likes to talk about generals and their plans, but he fails to note that most generals are not advocating a military response here. As per usual, he's talking out of his ass again but this time the higher ups know it.
