{"id":22656,"date":"2011-03-21T19:14:08","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T23:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=22656"},"modified":"2011-03-21T19:14:08","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T23:14:08","slug":"bass-ackward-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=22656","title":{"rendered":"Bass-ackward leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve already expressed my support for the recent US military action against the Libyan government, but I do depart with the President on his handling of the situation. If you can even call it “handling” at all. Obama explained why he authorized the military action today from sunny Santiago, Chile<\/a>;<\/p>\n

\u201cThe core principle that has to be upheld here is that when the entire international community, almost unanimously, says there\u2019s a potential humanitarian crisis about to take place \u2026 we can\u2019t simply stand by with empty words. We have to take some sort of action,\u201d Mr. Obama said at a joint press conference in Santiago with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera.<\/p>\n

Mr. Obama said the U.S. is taking the lead in the attacks with the goal of \u201ctaking out Libyan air defenses\u201d so that an eventual no-fly zone can be imposed against the forces of Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Mr. Obama said it will be a matter of \u201cdays\u201d before that first phase is completed and the U.S. turns leadership over to others to enforce the no-fly zone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After publicly dithering over Libya, he finds himself in the position of explaining what he’s already done when all of that should have been done while he was plotting out his March Madness strategy. That’s what a leader does…when he takes the action, the rest of us should have known why already. Now he’s just being defensive.<\/p>\n

Ask any squad leader if they explain to their troops why they’re walking through withering machine gun fire before or after the mission. <\/p>\n

Being a leader means convincing people of your plan’s merits so you don’t have to spend the rest of your life explaining it to dolts like me. I mean look at the opening line of that quote above; “The core principle that has to be upheld here…” Why is he explaining core principles that should already be firmly planted in the gray matter of Americans?<\/p>\n

The Washington Times quotes his notification to Congress;<\/p>\n

Monday afternoon Mr. Obama sent a letter to congressional leaders officially notifying them of the military action and saying it is \u201cin the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as commander in chief and chief executive.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That doesn’t explain anything about how it’s “in national security…interests”.<\/p>\n

We all knew what was going to happen what with carrier groups steaming towards Libya’s coast for weeks, What we didn’t have was the explanation of why we were sending our sons and daughters into yet another war. Still, I haven’t heard an explanation of what the national imperative was that required that the lives of Americans were put in danger. <\/p>\n

I mean, I know, but no one has said out loud that this is another war for oil. I don’t have a problem with that but I don’t want to be the only saying it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve already expressed my support for the recent US military action against the Libyan government, but … Bass-ackward leadership<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}