Trump is Half Right . . .

[redcliffsw]

In his campaign stump speech Donald Trump ridicules Obama for publicly announcing four months in advance that "we" will be invading Mosul, Iraq to kick out ISIS there and capture its leaders.  No element of surprise there.  Twelve minutes after the announcement, said Trump, and the ISIS leaders were gone.

Trump is right to mock this foolish talk. The element of surprise is what military commanders dream about. Stonewall Jackson's famous flanking maneuver at the Battle of Chancellorsville (VA), where his 60,000-man army outflanked and surprised the 133,000-man Army of the Potomac with a crushing defeat is still to this day taught at military academies around the world.

But Obama is not that stupid.  He's just not interested in winning the "war on terra," as Dub-Yuh called it. His main interest is keeping Boobus Americanus fooled into believing that that guy in the black pajamas with the giant sword will be in their neighborhood next week chopping off heads if we ever stop intervening in the Middle East.  It's all theater, in other words. That's why the regime announces some big new military escalation every few months, lest Boobus forgets that he's supposed to be frightened into acquiescing in the never-ending explosive growth of the military-industrial complex and the relentless growth of the state in general that it nourishes.
-Thomas DiLorenzo

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/trump-half-right-half-wrong-mosul/