All hail the chief as he brings home the troops from Iraq — but don’t say anything about the growing use of robot drones on the expanding battlefield of the war on terror.
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The end is near, finally, but only after thousands were killed in Iraq, civilians and soldiers both, the nation’s standing was damaged and our democracy was irreparably damaged.
The end of the war in Iraq, however, does not end the American imperial project. We remain entrenched in Afghanistan, with that war bleeding — literally — into Pakistan, and new military efforts taking place in Africa.
So, the president might deserve applause for ending the Iraq War, but let’s not fool ourselves into believing he has suddenly transformed into a peacenik. Bring the rest of the troops home and then we can talk.
I was trying to figure out what I should write in response to the news that Osama bin Laden was killed yesterday by American troops. It is not an easy topic, given my general abhorrence of the tools or war and my opposition to the death penalty, and my sense that his death might have some cathartic impact on our culture.
And yet, the chants of “USA, USA, USA,” and the tears and jubilation I witnessed on TV last night leave me feeling oddly disembodied.
I think the reason is that I remember the speed with which our political culture descended into jingoistic chest-thumping and I am concerned that the chanting and rooster-like crowing we are engaging in now will only lead us back to that uncomfortable place.
Just as significantly, there resides just below the surface of this apparent unity a festering ugliness that has only grown worse during the Obama presidency.
Reading the comments on my Patch sites, I was struck by these comments:
God bless America. Funny how Obama jumps right in to take all the credit!!
Then:
Barack Hussein, who never wore the uniform one day in his life, will take credit for the brave men who went in to a hostile country and rid us of Bin-Laden. How did Barack Hussein get this by Holder and the Justice Dept.?
The fact that bin Laden was living in a suburb of a major Pakistani city will be explained by some B.S. rather than the plain truth that the Pakis despise us and, while taking our money, give full support to our enemies.
Great job by the CIA and military. It is they whom we must rely on, and not the venal politicians like Barack Hussein.
A later respondent summed up what I think is the best way to view the two above comments — comments that are flying around via email and on Facebook and not just on news sites:
I assume that if Bush had given the order, you would have given him no credit as well? And that you would have repeatedly referred to him with thinly veiled bigotry?
Everyone, from our brave troops to our intelligence community to the President and his advisors deserve credit for finally putting this creep in the dirt. Let’s enjoy the achievement and celebrate being Americans.
There are other dangers, as the historian Rick Perlstein writes on his Facebook page:
I’m already seeing my liberal pals naively saying: neato! Now BHO can do his thing and bring the troops home, and end this “Global War on Terrorism” business just like he’s always wanted. But the only thing he said about the GWOT in the speech was that it ain’t over, and so did George W. Bush in Obama’s support—”the fight against terror goes on.” The modern presidency never gives up its power.
The modern presidency — which dates from the Kennedy administration — has only grown in unilateral power over the last 50 years. Obama, in far too many ways, has used the Global War on Terror as an excuse to maintain the powers accumulated in his office by his predecessors and to expand them (unmanned drone strikes in a nation with whom we are not only not at war, but that is supposed to be our ally).
I wish I could say I feel good about where we are this morning, but I am fearful that the imperial presidency and the rah-rah jingoism evident today might just give each other sustenance and push us one step farther down the road to fascism.
The debate over yesterday’s verdict in the terrorism trial of Ahmed Ghailani, which resulted in the Guantanamo detainee being convicted on only one of nearly 300 charges, is ignoring a basic precept of American democracy. The conviction on a charge related to a 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Africa — a conviction that has Ghailani facing between 20 years and life in prison — has conservatives renewing their call for those facing terror charges to be tried by a military tribunal and not in civilian criminal courts.
The verdict has been discussed within a context of effectiveness, using the assumption that failure to convict is a conviction of the system itself, one that requires us to suspend the basic rule of law and to move to an extra-judiciary measure.
“This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo.”
No one, however, is asking the question that needs to be asked. Were the acquittals due to the system itself, which is designed to defend the rights of the accused (a goal at which the system too often fails, but that is a topic for another post), an indictment of the system or did they occur because of a failure to collect the necessary evidence?
There is something more than a little disturbing about a mindset that demands we change the rules for a subset of people because we did not get the result we want, a mindset that endangers all of us because it chips away at the rights not only of Guantanamo detainees, but of everyone accused of a crime. It flips the basic premise of American justice — everyone is presumed not guilty until proven otherwise — and allows the presumption of guilt to become the standard.
This is far more of a threat to our country than anything threat we face from terrorism.
Barack Obama is more like George W. Bush than any of his supporters has been willing to admit. The 44th president, like his predecessor, has shown a willingness to break disagreements down into simple, binary equations, especially when it comes to his defense of empire.
“Evil does exist in the world,” he said during his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, echoing his predecessor, radically simplifying the world around us. Evil, he says, justifies our use of extreme force — which is what war is — rather than a smaller-scale attempt to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. The president has opted to reinvigorate the 9/11 meme to justify a wider-scale effort to remake the so-called Afpak border area, even if this war of his (and it is now his war) has nothing to do with 9/11.
The troubling aspect of this — beyond the Afghan escalation — is that he used his Nobel acceptance to hawk his own hawkishness, to defend his own indefensible decision to ratchet up the war. Obama, of course, is not a pacifist and has never claimed to be one. He has, from the beginning, viewed Afghanistan as a war of necessity in the very same way that Bush viewed Iraq.
And like Bush, who purposely conflated Saddam Hussein with Hitler, Obama has done the same with Al Qaeda.
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
Al Qaeda is not Hitler and terrorism is not the same as Nazism. Terrorism is a tool — like a gun or a tank — generally used by the relatively powerless to level the playing field against more powerful nations. It’s use is a symptom that our system is sick, that we have allowed some level of injustice to fester, to create an atmosphere in which violent reaction is viewed as necessary.There is no real difference between Timothy McVeigh and a Middle Eastern suicide bomber, no difference between the America militia movement and Al Qaeda. The extremisms they spout might come from different places, but the violence they unleash ultimately is the same, based on the same mix of grievance and moral certitude.
The president, however, for whatever reason, chooses to ignore this, to conflate the big ideological movements with a small regenerating band of extremists who pose a physical threat to individual security but in no way pose an existential threat to the United States.
He further argued during his speech that “it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world,” as if a world that witnessed dozens of political assassinations and violent uprisings, wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Algeria, the Middle East, a massive arms race and a calamitous international chess game between heavily armed nuclear powers can be called stable.
Obama is just a year older than I am, so I have to imagine he remembers crouching beneath his desk during air raid drills and hearing newscasters reporting on body counts and violence in American streets.
Let’s be clear: There was much to like in his speech — such as his acknowledgement that economic and social justice can prevent the slide into despair that creates the conditions in which violent extremism flourishes and his commitment to working within an international framework of established rules and in cooperation with other nations. But, in the end, his insistence that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace” left me wondering just how much has changed during the last 11 months.
Hank Kalet 