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Why Does Putin Surprise Us Again and Again? | » The Hidden Costs of Obama's Vision of American Power 14/03/16 08:31 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks

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Why Does Putin Surprise Us Again and Again? In Defense of the Obama Doctrine Monday March 14 th , 2016  at  8:38 AM Defense One - All Content 1 Share In October 2007 , Senator Barack Obama, then a struggling Democratic presidential candidate, stood before a few hundred students at DePaul University in Chicago and delivered a speech that few in the foreign-policy world noticed. Five years after his  famous statement  against the disastrous Iraq invasion, Obama wanted to do more than remind his audience that he had been right all along, which was of course a useful distinction with his chief rival at the time, Hillary Clinton. He didn’t blame the Iraq War simply on George W. Bush or some neoconservative cabal that had hijacked the government, as many Democrats preferred to believe so as to absolve themselves of responsibility. Instead, Obama delivered a broadside against what he called Washington “groupthink.” “The American people weren’t just