He said that the “9/11 generation of heroes” represented the very best in its country, and that its members constituted a military that was not only superior to all current adversaries but no less than “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” He noted that they were often the face of American influence in the world, being dispatched to Liberia in 2014 to cope with the then-dawning Ebola epidemic as they had been sent to Indonesia 10 years earlier to rescue victims of the catastrophic tsunami there. (“I know we’ve got some Air Force in the house!” and so on, receiving cheers rendered as “Hooyah!” and “Oorah!” in the official White House transcript.) He told members of the military that the nation was grateful for their nonstop deployments and for the unique losses and burdens placed on them through the past dozen years of open-ended war. Obama gave his still-not-quite-natural-sounding callouts to the different military services represented in the crowd. Usually I would have stopped watching too, since so many aspects of public figures’ appearances before the troops have become so formulaic and routine. As soon as that was over, they went back to their smartphones and their laptops and their Cinnabons as the president droned on. troops in Iraq (at the time, he didn’t), I noticed that many people in the terminal shifted their attention briefly to the TV. When Obama got to the section of his speech announcing whether he planned to commit U.S. I watched it on an overhead TV while I sat waiting for a flight at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. This was big enough news that many cable channels covered the speech live.
The part of the speech intended to get coverage was Obama’s rationale for reengaging the United States in Iraq, more than a decade after it first invaded and following the long and painful effort to extricate itself. There he addressed some of the men and women who would implement whatever the U.S. In mid-September, while President Obama was fending off complaints that he should have done more, done less, or done something different about the overlapping crises in Iraq and Syria, he traveled to Central Command headquarters, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
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