Four years
into his presidency, Barack Obama’s political formula should be obvious. He
gives fabulous speeches teeming with popular liberal ideas, often refuses to
take the actions necessary to realize those ideas and then banks on most voters,
activists, reporters and pundits never bothering to notice - or care about - his
sleight of hand.
Whether railing
on financial crime and then refusing to prosecute Wall Street executives or
berating health insurance companies and then passing a health care bill bailing
out those same companies, Obama embodies a cynical ploy - one that relies on a
celebrity-entranced electorate focusing more on TV-packaged rhetoric than on
legislative reality.
Never was this
formula more apparent than when the president discussed military conflicts
during his second inaugural address. Declaring that “a decade of war is now
ending,” he insisted that he “still believe(s) that enduring security and
lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”
The lines
generated uncritical applause, much of it from anti-war liberals who protested
against the Bush administration. Living up to Obama’s calculation, few seemed to
notice that the words came from the same president who is manufacturing a state
of “perpetual war.”
Obama, let’s
remember, is the president who escalated the Afghanistan War and whose spokesman
recently reiterated that U.S. troops are not necessarily leaving that country
anytime soon. He is the president who has initiated undeclared wars in Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia and Libya. He is also the president who, according to data from
the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, has launched more than 20,000 air
strikes—and those assaults show no sign of stopping.
We know that
latter point to be the true because just days before Obama’s inaugural address
declaring an end to war, the Washington Post reported that the administration’s
new manual establishing “clear rules” for counterterrorism operations
specifically creates a “carve-out (that) would allow the CIA to continue” the
president’s intensifying drone war.
That’s the
“perpetual war,” you’ll recall, in which Obama asserts the extra-constitutional
right to compile a “kill list” and then order bombing raids of civilian areas in
hopes of killing alleged militants - including U.S.
citizens.
According to a
study by the New America Foundation, roughly one in five of those killed by such
strikes are civilians. However, even that troubling number may understate the
situation. That’s because, as the New York Times previously reported, the Obama
administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”
even though, according to a CIA official, Obama aides “are not really sure who
they are.”
Obama partisans’
typical riposte to these horrifying truths is to first and foremost attack the
messenger. As just one example, a confidante of Obama’s national security
director recently berated war critics as “Cheeto-eating people in the basement
working in their underwear.”
These same
partisans then typically blurt out two words: national security. But the
argument that the president’s drone war is protecting America is as flip as it
is inaccurate.
That’s the
conclusion of a new analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations - an
establishmentarian group that cannot be dismissed with insults about snack food,
subterranean dwelling and tighty-whities. Citing a concurrent increase in drone
strikes and terrorists in Yemen, CFR says there is a predictable “blowback”
effect whereby bombings result in “heightened anger toward the United States and
sympathy with or allegiance to al-Qaida” among local
populations.
These facts, of course, are a downer for those mesmerized by the president’s soothing inauguration rhetoric. No doubt, he is hoping we simply ignore reality because we so want to believe the anti-war oratory. If we do that, though, we will be aiding and abetting the very state of “perpetual war” that the president has created.
AGB/AGB
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