LOUISVILLE, KY – MAY 20: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) speaks at the National Rifle Association’s NRA-ILA Leadership Forum during the NRA Convention at the Kentucky Exposition Center on May 20, 2016 in Louisville, Kentucky. The convention, which opened today, runs May 22. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Source: Time

By Sen. Rand Paul

Paul is the junior U.S. Senator for Kentucky.
‘One generation cannot bind another generation to perpetual war’

This president has now been at war longer than any other in history. That must end.

“President Obama came into office seven years ago pledging to end the wars of his predecessor, George W. Bush,” the New York Timesreported this month. “On May 6, with eight months left before he vacates the White House, Mr. Obama passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.”

In his last months in office, you would think President Obama might be trying to wind down these seemingly never ending and growing series of wars. You would be wrong.

President Obama said he was ending the War in Afghanistan, but he had to expand it before he could end it; and yet it has not ended. Together Bush and Obama have now spent more than $100 billion on nation-building in Afghanistan, and still many doubt the ability of the Afghan government to stand on its own two feet.

While our bridges crumble here at home, President Obama continues the cycle of bombing and then replacing their infrastructure.

He brags of ending the Iraq war, but the war there hasn’t ended. The enemy has just changed names. Combat troops have slowly grown.

Air wars and “advisors” are now in Syria and Iraq. Last month the President declared he was sending 250 Special Operations Forces to Syria. Who goes to war with 250 soldiers?

President Obama spent $500 million to train 250 Syrian “moderates.” He proceeded to send ten of them into battle and they were captured within ten minutes and stripped of millions of dollars in weapons. Who sends ten soldiers to war?

“Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate,” the New YorkTimes continued, will “have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln.”

Remember “change?” Remember a candidate who said, “Yes we can?”

Well, no, Mr. President, you didn’t.

Then candidate Obama’s stated views on both war and the constitutional separation of war powers were among the few things I liked and admired about his policies.

But he has abandoned every shred of them in becoming an unconstitutional war starter.

There’s no question that President Obama has been presented with a difficult task in fighting ISIS. But key tenets of his administration’s foreign policy have only strengthened the Islamic State. James Baker, former Secretary of State under President George H.W. Bush, recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it was U.S. interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria that helped create the instability that has benefited Islamic extremists. “Look where we are now in all three of those places: Syria, Iraq, Libya,”Baker said.

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