Obama would have never done that in 48 hrs, it’s a complete indictment – former Obama guy

Politico lays out some really surprising quotes from former Obama camp members, who are absolutely thrilled that Trump so quickly and decisively struck Syria, because the old ditherer-in-chief would never do it like it. Or at all.

Many of the most head-snapping comments I heard came from Obama’s own top advisers, who had long pushed him to confront Assad more aggressively and viewed his 2013 refusal to take military action against Syria after drawing a “red line” on chemical weapons use as a major American foreign policy debacle. There’s no love lost in this group for Trump, who found themselves in the uncomfortable position of cheering a leader they still both loathe and fear.

“Our administration never would have gotten this done in 48 hours,” one former senior official of his administration told me. “It’s a complete indictment of Obama.”

“I feel like finally we have done the right thing,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as Obama’s first-term chief of policy planning at the State Department and long publicly urged a more forceful response to Assad’s horrific attacks on civilians during the six years of war that have wracked Syria, told me. “The years of hypocrisy just hurt us all. It undermined the U.S., it undermined the world order.”

Slaughter, now the head of the New America Foundation and a major backer of Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton last November, tweeted, “Donald Trump has done the right thing on Syria. Finally!! After years of useless handwringing in the face of atrocities.” I later asked her if it was awkward to be cheering for Trump now. “I’m just glad to see it,” she said. “It was the right thing.”

Isn’t that remarkable? And it vindicates a lot of the criticisms that Republicans and conservatives had against Obama – even though these people at the time just called us racist for saying so.

Where Obama touted “soft power” and said that his principle was “don’t do stupid sh*t,” it appears that Trump is going to shoot from the hip, based on his hunches, which will be right sometimes and wrong sometimes. Of course, his only principle is that he’ll never admit when he’s wrong. But at least the world has been put on notice that America is not going to withhold using the military might that we seemed to be embarrassed of under Obama…


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