And Another Thing

Oh, and while I'm on the topic of people forgetting the recent past, what's with the praise President Obama has gotten for our pivot to the Pacific? While I wrote that I have no problem with this and kudos for the Marines to Australia annoucement, I didn't understand why it had to be paired with contrasts that condemned Bush for ignoring the Pacific. Obama's actions were not fixing a problem of the Bush adminsitration no matter how much this was portrayed as newly discovered smart diplomacy.

As with many good things Obama does, the pivot to the Pacific was a continuation of Bush policies. I ran across this in my older Yahoo!Geocities site (now mostly preserved at Reocities and I think another site?):

“Preparing for the Future” (Posted November 13, 2003)

We are transforming our global deployment to end the Cold War traditional deployment and create a force agile enough for the war on terrorists and their sponsors and for preempting nuclear threats. Right now the focus is Asia:

The changes will be part of a worldwide adjustment of U.S. forces to reflect Rumsfeld's view that the static defensive positions adopted by the United States and its traditional allies during the Cold War are not well suited to meet the evolving security threats of the 21st century.

We may also deploy a carrier battle group to Guam, according to the article, or perhaps Hawaii, to be closer than our West Coast bases.

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You'll need to scroll down if you want to see the original (but since this is the entire post, I don't know why you would) since this pre-dates even my primitive anchors that substitituted for post links prior to my move to Blogger.

President Obama's only refinement is to make this implicitly directed at China rather than a global war on terror thing. Which is smarter diplomacy will never be asked in this day and age of teeny bopper press coverage of their dreamy president who still gives them tingles up their legs.