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POTUS is a legend… in his own mind.

So, why bother taking advice from the peasants?

Via Weekly Standard:

….Barack Obama remains committed to a failed strategy against an enemy he has long underestimated in a war he has no plans to win. Nothing has changed. And this time, what’s past truly is prologue….

Four months before he was elected president, Obama traveled to Iraq for briefings on the war he had long opposed. He met with General David Petraeus, who was then seeking to consolidate U.S. and coalition gains resulting from the surge in American forces and the Anbar Awakening. When Petraeus insisted that Iraq, not Afghanistan, was the central front in the war against al Qaeda, Obama challenged him, arguing that Al Qaeda in Iraq—the organization that would grow to become ISIS—had little ambition or reach beyond Iraq.

According to an account of the meeting in The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, by New York Times correspondent Michael Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Obama questioned “whether al Qaeda in Iraq presented a threat to the United States.” He said: “If AQI has morphed into a kind of mafia then they are not going to be blowing up buildings.” Petraeus pointed to an attempted attack in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, as an example of AQI’s reach and expressed concern about “the potential of AQI to expand its influence to Syria and Lebanon.” Obama was unmoved. “The al Qaeda leadership is not here in Iraq. They are there,” Obama said, pointing to Pakistan on a map.

It was an instructive exchange. Obama, a first-term senator with no experience in military or intelligence matters, challenged the general who had beaten back a jihadist insurgency in Iraq, led a remarkable turnaround in the country, and was a leading figure in America’s broader war on terror. The assessments Petraeus offered were based on years of personal experience guiding U.S. troops against jihadist armies generally, and Al Qaeda in Iraq specifically, and they were bolstered by mountains of intelligence reporting on the enemy, its objectives, and its practices.

Obama simply thought he knew better. His challenge wasn’t based on facts that contradicted Petraeus, or on facts at all. Rather, Obama made a series of assertions based on nothing more than his long-held conviction that Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror. And when he was presented with evidence that contradicted his thesis, Obama simply set it aside and restated his own view. It’s a pattern that would play out repeatedly throughout his presidency…..

Related:

PJ Media: Obama: Nihilist or Just Incompetent?