The real scandal of Obama's second term
How Barack Obama went from nuclear freeze advocate to leader of a global squad of flying death robots.
The real scandal of Obama's second term
He was just a skinny 22-year-old seemingly no different from so many college kids back in 1983 – writing ponderous pieces for a student newspaper about the nuclear freeze movement and railing against “the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets” -- under the headline “Breaking the War Mentality.”
But this one kid at Columbia University actually was different. Three decades later, Barack Obama is now in his second term as president – commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, with broad executive power over the American way of war.
And the signature piece of his Obama’s national security policy, increasingly, is something that not only would have shocked his beer buddies in back in Morningside Heights. It has also surprised and dismayed some of his most ardent political supporters in the 2010s who voted for a rollback of the militarism and imperial overreach of the Bush-Cheney years:
It is a full-throated embrace of flying billion-dollar “erector sets” – drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, that can rain down death and destruction on targets halfway across the globe with zero immediate risk to American life.
Obama’s expanded, top-secret drone war has allowed the U.S. to kill high-level members of al-Qaeda without the risks that ground troops have faced in Iraq or Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been fighting more than 11 years.
But in doing so, a president who promised “the most open and transparent administration in history” has gone to Nixonian lengths to hide its actions from the American people and from Congress. He’s ordered missile attacks on countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia with which the nation is not at war – drone strikes that in addition to its targets have killed as many as 1,000 innocent civilians, including women and children.
And according to a White House white paper obtained by NBC News, Obama has claimed a power never even envisioned during the waterboarding-drenched years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – the ability to order the assassination of an American citizen believed to be engaged with al-Qaeda at a high level, even if that citizen is not currently plotting against the U.S.
Just two weeks after a triumphant second inauguration, the Obama administration was in a rare defensive posture on Thursday, releasing to Congress its once-secret rationale for its ability to kill American al-Qaeda members, as Obama’s pick to run the CIA -- counterterrorism chief John Brennan -- defended the drone policies. His hearing was interrupted by protests that harkened back to the Bush era – such as a woman holding aloft a sign, “Drones Fly Children Die.”
The irony boggles the mind. After a long barrage from the right flank accusing the 44th president of everything from Kenyan citizenship to plotting a socialist takeover, will this become the scandal of Barack Obama second term…the betrayal of his liberal ideals?
"As successor to George W. Bush, Obama is continuing Bush's wars by other means,” Andrew Bacevich, the retired Army colonel who’s now a Boston University professor of international relations and frequent critic of U.S. militarism, told me. “Rather than invading and occupying countries, he relies on alternative methods, with missile-firing drones his preferred weapon of war."
In doing so, Obama’s also sparked a new civil war – among the American left. On Twitter and other venues, liberals who just weeks ago seemed united in joy over the president’s re-election have been at each other’s virtual throats, in a war of words pitting old-school anti-war activists against Obama partisans inclined to support the president -- even for policies they surely would have excoriated if pursued under Bush and Cheney.
How did we get to this strange place?
Steve Clemons, a foreign policy expert affiliated with the centrist New America Foundation, said the drone campaign started as a way for Obama to prove as toughness toward terrorism while he ended the Iraq War and strived – not successfully yet – to wind down the conflict in Afghanistan. But over time, the power to kill alleged terrorists at no cost to American life has lured Obama, the Pentagon, and the CIA to expand the campaign to new lands and to lower-level operatives.
“There’s an ease of doing it that has become too habitual – and I think there’s a risk of major mistakes,” Clemons said.
I agree. It seems that a tipping point was crossed a long time ago, in a world where flying U.S. death robots are now whipping up more anti-Americanism than can – or should -- be zapped with Hellfire missiles. And I worry that Obama and his ambitions have been sucked into an even more powerful vortex, where every international problem looks like a nail that can only be hammered down by our “billion-dollar erector sets.”
And here’s the scariest part. If the author of “Breaking the War Mentality” is helpless to stop this out-of-control spiral…can anyone?
The Administration's racist cowardly fraudulent policy is to declare any male killed in a drone strike who is not a wee child - all drone murdered teenage and adult MALES are deemed terrorists as A MATTER OF OFFICIAL COUNTING AND OFFICIALLY MAINTAINED DATA - and this obviously skews downward the number of admitted civilian deaths, and bolsters the Administration's terrorist killed successes.— zen- I'm just glad its President Obama's administration running the drones than Romney and his cronies.— gibby58
- Here's another Ripley's Believe it or Not -> in 2011, the Obama Aministration's - OFFICIAL STATISTIC is ZERO ( 0 ), nada, donut hole , ZERO CIVILIANS KILLED in the entire 2011 drone strike campaign. In 200 drone strikes, the Administration's official position is 1300 terrorists killed and 30 civilians killed. Any males not children within the blast range of a terrorist is definitionally deemed 'enemy combatant'.— zen
- Spare us the phony outrage and righteous indignation. You and the rest of Goober Nation would be the first ones accusing Obama of incompetence if he did nothing and a plot was successful.
We are at war. Terrorists declared war on us and attacked us, killing thousands of citizens. Destroying our enemies is not a police action, it is a military action, and our president, as Commander in Chief has a duty to authorize our military to destroy our enemies with every available tool at their disposal and at minimum risk to our own soldiers. I guess you would feel better about this if our enemies wore uniforms of the State that they are fighting for, but those days are over. It is now post 9/11 and we can't afford to be so rigid in our definition of what is war.— wokmaster - Typical response from a guy who worships guns. No brain.
— wokmaster - Shouldn't you be making love to your guns right now? — wokmaster
- WOk..you still have not answered my previous question...What do you do for a living that gives you the right to spew your venom on people? I'll be waiting for you answer....and waiting....and waiting.
- I think Wok has the right to spew venom. That's the entire point of these fora.
— Mr. Smith - Already replied two different times to your inquiry. One more time: none of your f**king business where I work, what I do or who I am, punk. Just know this, I've fought for my country. How about you? — wokmaster
- OMG Obama is killing Americans even if they aren't plotting against us now? Where is all of the liberal umbrage and indignation now that a president from the democrat party is killing Americans? You folks are hypocrites at best!
Cleanup city hall one politician at a time. Start with criminal Blondell Reynolds Brown and have DA Williams stop hiding and indict her. Call for your impotent Mayor and the other council members deman that she resign!
WWW.RECALLBLONDELLREYNOLDSBROWN.ORG— SPENDSPEND - "Allowing the Central Bank to pour nearly $9T in cheap money into the economy artificially inflating it resulting in first the Dot Com bubble and then the Housing bubble." NO he didn't - this statement is completely wrong. There was no "pouring of nearly 9T in cheap money into the economy". Professor hates that he has to give up essential liberty in order to -- have police enforce law. Professor wants "an eye for an eye" vigilante justice. So therefore he doesn't deserve police protection.— Murrayman
- "Where is all of the liberal umbrage and indignation now that a president from the democrat party is killing Americans? You folks are hypocrites at best!" You posted this in a blog written by a liberal describing in detail outrage being shown by liberals. The disconnect is just shocking. Its hilarious and tragic really.— Murrayman
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