Is It Even Possible For a President to Stop Supporting US Wars?

[kerrywins]

Would any candidate be allowed to stop supporting US led wars?

Or does the military industrial complex have such a strong hold, no person in the oval office can change US's ever increasing empire?

[villager]

1. You mean, do their parade routes get coincidentally "altered" at the last minute?

n/t

[Cirque du So-What]

2. My thoughts exactly

If the truth ever emerges, I expect powerful entities within the military-industrial complex to be implicated (cough*bush*cough).

[jobycom]

4. If that's a JFK reference, the route wasn't altered.

Just sayin'. There's a lie floating around making that claim, based on one Dallas newspaper's miniature map of the route, but that map was too small to be to scale, and the printout of the route even in that paper showed the same route that the motorcade actually took. The other Dallas paper printed a larger map, and clearly showed the route the motorcade took. That was one of those fictional creations Stone used to make his movie convincing, like using smoke machines to represent rifle fire because modern rifles don't smoke, or making up statistics about the number of people who heard four shots or who thought the shots came from the Grassy Knoll, or having Lee Harvey Oswald swing his fist at the arresting officer when in real life he pulled a gun on the officer and tried to kill him, or having Lee Harvey Oswald drinking a Coke in the break lounge after the shooting when in reality the responding officer found him in the hallway just outside the stairwell door rushing towards the break lounge with his hands empty, or altering the limosine seats to make it look like Connally was directly in front of JFK when he was really on a seat a foot lower than Kennedy's and a foot more inbound than Kennedy so that it looked like the "magic bullet" had to zig zag instead of following a perfectly straight trajectory as it would have had to in real life to cause the wounds in JFK and Kennedy, or.... well, it was all fiction.

Sorry, I just spent too much of my life studying to be an historian. These things just pop out. :)

[villager]

8. From the DU Archives:

6. The original JFK parade route was changed to go through Dealey Plaza.
You say:
If the route was changed then what were all the people doing lining the street? Why was Zapruder filming if he didn't know JFK was coming down Elm?

THEY CHANGED IT DAYS BEFORE...THAT'S WHY.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x763515

[Warpy]

3. As the CIC, he's authorized to order troops to enter or leave

Congress is charged with drawing up the treaty that ends the war, if one was ever declared in the first place.

[jobycom]

5. Of course it's possible, if the president has the experience, and wisdom, and confidence.

That's why I didn't like Obama in the primaries. He didn't have the experience, or any executive experience, and people without that experience are often easier to push around by the people the experts they hire. Happened to LBJ, too. He was a career legislator, and as president wanted to pull the troops out of Viet Nam, but his advisors all told him he didn't understand the complexity of the issue, and that there were too many committments at stake, and that the little kids and the women in Viet Nam would be slaughtered if we just pulled out, so it was better to send more troops and gain control of the situation, and then we could safely pull out from a position of strength. Years later, after millions had died, we finally did what LBJ was convinced not to do, and the women and children were slaughtered anyway. All LBJ's weakness did was delay the inevitable.

Obama is falling for the same lines. I saw that during the primaries, too, when his advisor (Forget her name) went on the BBC explaining the Obama's 18 month Iraq pullout plan was a best-case scenario, and Iraq was not a best-case situation, so the troops might be there longer, until they could stabilize the government and live up to our committments and leave from a position of strength so that the women and children wouldn't be slaughtered... Now they've even convinced Code Pink that this must be done in Afghanistan as well.

Obama's not wise yet, but he's smart, and I hope he wakes up soon and realizes he's being played in the classic way. Then he can remember who is president, and take charge. There's still hope.

On the other hand, Clinton was constantly standing up to ehe military complex, and they just refused to listen to him. He ordered the military to send commandoes into Afghanistan to get Bin Laden in 98, and they wrote him a long report explaining why it was so hard that they weren't going to bother. He won some battles with them, but they are too independent for our nation's good.

My random opinion.

[Echo In Light]

6. No...that's precisely the sort of thing that hinges upon the "electable" criteria/ruse...

It works like this: if you plan on actively working (what a joke in and of itself) within govt to stop war, than the corporate/state nexus deems you, via M$M, "unelectable."

Such powerful structures have no desire for self-sabotage, so they'll adopt the puppet who says shit people want to hear, but are not actually going to follow through on. That's where many Dems get it wrong everytime, w/o fail, and lash out so violently at Reps and candidates, and former ones, who would actually pose a threat...which, really isn't a threat at all since powerful, hallowed systems ensure those people will never get their foot through the door.

[notesdev]

7. I wonder what would happen if

the President said, "I see no formal declaration of war, and therefore I am not authorized to keep these troops abroad", then moved to bring them home immediately. Would Congress issue the declaration or would they sit back and let it happen?