Obama speech to soldiers met with silence |
| US President Barack Obama addresses troops inside the 1st Aviation Support Battalion Hangar August 31, 2012 at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) |
President Barack Obama was greeted with fleeting applause and extended periods of silence as he offered profuse praise to soldiers and their families during an Aug. 31 speech in Fort Bliss, Texas.
His praise for the soldiers — and for his own national-security policies — won cheers from only a small proportion of the soldiers and families in the cavernous aircraft-hanger.
The audience remains quiet even when the commander-in-chief thanked the soldiers’ families, and cited the 198 deaths of their comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The audience’s reaction was so flat that the president tried twice to elicit a reaction from the crowd.
“Hey, I hear you,” he said amid silence.
The selected soldiers who were arrayed behind the president sat quietly throughout the speech.
CNN and MSNBC ended their coverage of the speech before it was half-over.
The president’s speech to the soldiers is part of his constitutional duties as commander-in-chief.
But Obama and his wife are also trying to reach out to military families in several critical swing-states, including Virginia and Florida.
That outreach, however, has been damaged by repeated flubs from the White House, including its public emphasis on soldiers’ wounds rather than on their accomplishments, and Obama’s effort to distance himself from the anti-jihad campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For example, Obama gave Vice President Joe Biden the task of developing a post-war agreement with Iraq’s government in 2009. The effort failed, reducing U.S. gains from the campaign that killed almost 4,500 troops, and as well as thousands of jihadis and Sunni insurgents seeking to regain power. The subsequent withdrawal of nearly all U..S. troops has allowed Iran to increase its influence in Iraq. In turn, that influence helps it support Syria’s dictatorship against Sunni insurgents.
White House officials are trying to avoid additional flubs. On Friday, for example, White House officials rushed to debunk a report that the president had used an autopen to sign condolence letters to soldiers’ families.
Throughout Friday’s speech, the loudest reactions came when the president name-checked the nicknames of the soldiers’ brigades. Major military units have their own rival cheers, and those could be heard from portions of the audience when he referred to individual units.
The troops’ silence continued through several obvious applause-lines.
There was isolated cheers when Obama said his withdrawal policy would ensure “fewer deployments … more time to prepare for the future, and it means more time on the home front, with your families, your home and kids.”
The silence deepened when the president lauded his strategy of withdrawal from the war. “Make no mistake, ending the wars responsibly makes us safer and our military even stronger, and ending these wars is letting us do something else; restoring American leadership,” he said amid complete silence.
When he said demobilized soldiers would find jobs because “all of you have the skills America needs,” he got little reaction.
There was no reaction when he promised stepped-up recruitment of soldiers for police jobs.
He won some applause when he announced his support for soldiers injured in combat.
The most enthusiastic applause came when he lauded the soldiers’ military mission, and promised continued support for that professional task.
An anecdote about his meeting with a wounded soldier was met with a tepid response, until he described the soldier’s determination to recover and return to his unit. “He’s where every soldier wants to be – back with his unit,” Obama said, generating applause.
Similarly, his declaration that “around the world there’s a new attitude toward America, a new confidence in our leadership” yielded only silence, while his next sentence — “When people are asked ‘Which country do you admire most?’ one nation always comes out on top, the United States of America” — prompted relative enthusiasm.
The White House’s video-feed cut off 10 seconds after the president finished his speech, before the audience’s reaction overall could be gauged by viewers.
Obama warm to scientists, cold to soldiers
Two of President Barack Obama’s public appearances Friday provided a study in his starkly contrasting attitudes toward two very different constituencies: the scientific community and the United States military.
First, the president fulfilled his campaign promise to pull U.S. forces from Iraq by announcing the withdrawal of all troops by the end of 2011. His subdued briefing came from the dark blue White House press podium.
Less than two hours later, however, he used the bright and gilded East Room of the White House to formally present awards to top-flight scientists. After a military honor guard formally saluted the nation’s colors, Obama declared: “Thanks to the men and women on the stage, we are one step closer to curing diseases like cancer and Parkinson’s … I hope everybody enjoys this wonderful celebration and reception, and again, thank you so much for helping to make the world a better place.”
The president’s tone was markedly different as he announced the troop withdrawal, focusing more on regret than on victories won.
“As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war to a responsible end … After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” he said at the start of his clipped, six-minute presentation. “There will be some difficult days ahead for Iraq … Here at home, the coming months will be another season of homecomings.”
Obama is already campaigning for re-election, and the troop withdrawal from Iraq will please the important progressive wing of the Democratic Party. That liberal faction boosted him into the presidency after he declared in 2002 that the proposed removal of Iraq’s dictator would be a “dumb war.”
Progressives often laud their university peers in the science sector, however.
“One of the best ways we can inspire more young people to think big, dream big dreams, is by honoring the people who already do: folks who are smart and aren’t afraid to show it, but also folks who have taken that brilliance and gone out and changed the world,” Obama said in the 20-minute ceremony, before a military aide read commendations while the president placed medals on 12 U.S. and foreign-born scientists.
“It’s important to recognize that work, and to help make it easier for inventors and innovators like them to bring their work from the lab to the marketplace and create jobs,” Obama beamed.
Instead of providing similar praise for the accomplishments of U.S. troops, however, Obama emphasized their suffering. “This December will be a time to reflect on all that we’ve been though in this war,” he said, not to celebrate the campaign’s accomplishments.
Obama did not mention Iraq’s deposed dictator, Saddam Hussein, nor the success of seeing democratic elections, nor the emergence of the long-suppressed Shia majority, nor the U.S. military’s remarkable victory against the coalition of Hussein’s die-hards, Sunni tribes, Iranian gunmen and Syrian-aided Islamist suicide bombers.
The most poignant moment came in a subsequent briefing by deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough. He said that during a morning video conference with the White House, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki showed “what appeared to me to be genuine appreciation of the sacrifice … that the troops and their families have put on the line for Iraq’s future.”
More than 4,500 U.S. and allied troops lost their lives — and nearly 30,000 sustained injuries — trying to establish and protect democracy in Iraq.
During his brief appearance, Obama did not mention al-Qaida’s strategic defeat in Iraq, coming as a result of Arabs’ collective recoil from Islamists’ suicide bombings aimed at other Arabs in Iraq’s cities and towns.
Despite growing opposition from ordinary Arabs and Muslims, al-Qaida used those shocking tactics because it believed that Bush’s plan to establish democracy in Iraq would be an ideological defeat of its core belief that the Arab world should be ruled by a Baghdad-based Muslim theocratic dictator — dubbed the caliph.
“The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation,” said a 2004 message from Osama bin Laden. That war, he said, urging Islamist gunmen to fight in Iraq, “is raging in the land of the two rivers. The world’s millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate.”
The “land of the two rivers” is Iraq, whose geography is framed by the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Now those gunmen and bin Laden are dead. And the capital of the would-be caliphate is under the secure control of an elected government and army led by Shia Muslims, who al-Qaida considers heretics.
During the Democratic presidential primary, Obama showed his opposition to the Iraq campaign by promising to withdraw U.S. troops, even if the departure resulted in a bloody civil war.
“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama told the Associated Press.
“It was the dominant issue [in the 2008 race and] … then-Senator Obama took a very clear position,” a White House spokesman said at Friday’s press conference.
Obama did include some brief references to the trials of U.S. troops.
“The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success,” he said, before he depicted the soldiers as wounded and in need of help from domestic government programs. “We’ll honor our many wounded warriors and the nearly 4,500 American patriots — and their Iraqi and coalition partners — who gave their lives to this effort … we’ll never stop working to give them and their families the care, the benefits and the opportunities that they have earned.”
Obama also played up U.S. diplomats’ role moving forward. “With our diplomats and civilian advisers in the lead,” the president said, “we’ll help Iraqis strengthen institutions that are just, representative and accountable.”
The president’s remarks ended with a call for Americans to turn inwards. “After a decade of war,” he said, “the nation that we need to build — and the nation that we will build — is our own.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/21/obama-warm-to-scientists-cold-to-soldiers/#ixzz25AY3ECXw
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