Originally Posted by roachboy

these are kinda absurd questions, ace, which are based on some projections concerning who you are talking to and logical moves that seem to come from some private language space.

first off, speaking for myself, i never accepted the "war on terror" as a phrase that meant anything. it represented the illusion of a coherent response from the bush administration, so was a quintessential meme, something which acquired a weight entirely through repetition. apart from its rhetorical functions, there was no referent and could not have been a referent--so it's about constructing a signified and by constructing that signified providing a putative target against which the Mighty Penis of Retribution could then be smacked.
obviously and from the outset obama can on a very different platform. you'd have to have been a fool not to know his position on "the war on terror"....this is one reason i consider him a moderate and supported him with serious reservations. to my mind, he has been more or less as i expected he would be once in office---the ways in which that is not the case have almost all followed from the gifts left behind by the Magic Imploding Spectacle of the Bush People having been far more seriously problematic than i thought.

your notion of the latitude available to a Leader-type in a historical situation comes from fairy tales. anyone is shaped by the situation in which they find themselves. you seem to imagine that a Leader can somehow step outside his or her own context and make Abstract Decisions about that context as if it were someplace else, that affected someone else. i don't know where you get the idea from that this sort of thing is possible. maybe you think Presidents are gods somehow. so that kind of fairy tale, ace.

and the answer to your question of ownership of a particular decision seems to me to be so self-evident as to require no response.