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For a president who came into office repudiating the foreign policy of his predecessor, vowing to end two wars, President Obama leaves office with the world in chaos and the U.S. military involved in three conflicts.

In January 2014, at his State of the Union Address, President Obama stated, “When I took office, nearly 180,000 Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, all our troops are out of Iraq. More than 60,000 of our troops have already come home from Afghanistan. With Afghan forces now in the lead for their own security, our troops have moved to a support role. Together with our allies, we will complete our mission there by the end of this year, and America’s longest war will finally be over.”

This bold pronouncement by the president was premature as later that summer, ISIS, who the president dismissed as the “JV Team”, boldly overran Iraqi forces in Northern and Western Iraq, seizing vast array of territory and forcing the president to send the U.S. military back into Iraq.

Obama Expands War in Middle East

Even back in October 2015, NPR reported that overall, the U.S. military presence in the region is a small fraction of what it was when Obama entered office. Yet during his presidency, the U.S. has bombed seven separate Muslim countries. He’s reluctantly launched an air campaign in Syria, returned U.S. forces to Iraq, and on Thursday he announced he would extend the stay of the troops in Afghanistan.

Twice this year President Obama and his Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, showed contempt and ridiculed the U.S. foreign policy establishment as reactionary and not understanding the depth of accepting his intellectual insight and vision on how he is handling the challenges confronting the United States.

Far too often the president and his close advisers in the White House have been all too dismissive of advice from seasoned foreign policy hands.  Last month former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in both the Bush and Obama administration, openly criticized the president for political “backflips” on whether U.S. forces are engaged in combat in Iraq and Syria.

“I think that it is incredibly unfortunate not to speak openly about what’s going on,” Mr. Gates said on MSNBC. “American troops are in action, they are being killed, they are in combat. And these semantic backflips to avoid using the term combat is a disservice to those who are out there putting their lives on the line.”

Even with all the attention on Iraq and Syria, Afghanistan has faded from the public conscious, but even the one conflict that the president campaigned as the “good war” he tried to end, simultaneously surging U.S. forces into the country.

President Obama’s Afghan Strategy in Disarray

Military Analyst Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that the administration has already had to accept the fact that its poorly planned and poorly executed efforts to first surge U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2009, to withdraw them at the end of 2014, and finally to virtually eliminate a U.S. advisory mission by the end of this year, has been a total failure. This withdrawal plan has never taken inn to account the real world conditions on the ground, or the limits of the Afghan forces that were rushed into being ready for such a mission. These are troops who were forced into their mission only a decade after the United States first intervened in 2001, and were only given the proper funds and trainers as recently as 2011-2012.

The president’s never fully understood or took into account the complexities of the realties on the ground in Afghanistan.  He never understood and failed to appreciate the support Pakistan was giving to the various terror organizations inside and outside of Afghanistan.

Obama Lacks Passion as Commander-in-Chief

Gates mentions in his memoirs, “Duty, Memoirs of a Secretary of State at War,” that the president lacked passion and resolve when dealing with international issues, especially his role as Commander-in-Chief.

“Where this lack of passion mattered most for me was Afghanistan. When soldiers put their lives on the line, they need to know that the commander-in-chief who sent them in harm’s way believes in their mission. They need him to talk often to them and to the country, not just to express gratitude for their service and sacrifice but also to explain and affirm why that sacrifice is necessary, why their fight is noble, why their cause is just, and why they must prevail.”

“President Obama never did that. He rarely spoke about the war in Afghanistan except when he was making an announcement about troop increases or troop drawdowns or announcing a change in strategy. White House references to “exit paths,” “drawdowns,” and “responsibly ending wars” vastly outnumbered references to “success” or even “accomplishing the mission.” Given his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan, I think I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him. … I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission.”

President Obama’s stated objective was to end the war in Afghanistan; but he took a detour after having witnessed the chaos which ensued following his precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraq, even after his military commanders warned against such action.

The president reversed his strategy of removing U.S. combat forces, because he didn’t want a replication of what happened in Iraq to be duplicated in Afghanistan.

Now come January 2017, President Obama will hand over the reins of power to his successor, whoever that will be, and when he does he will leave three conflicts to his successor; the unfished war in Afghanistan, a new war in Libya, and renewed conflict in Iraq, which has been expanded into Syria.

This is a far cry from the president who campaigned on “Ending the Wars” and the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace, to leave office with the U.S. engaged in more conflicts then when he entered.