Many commentators, in particular the writers over at Slate, appear impressed that the President acknowledged the complexities of war and peace at all (my, how our standards have waned). Above all, it was a far more satisfying embrace of realism that one imagines ever having heard from George W. - but to say that his vision for the world is markedly different from that of the neocons would be a tough case to make. In addition, Obama's insistence that America only ever engages in war with the greatest of reluctance, only in the darkest of hours, and in full recognition of the resulting misery, frankly stretches the imagination.
As I've fumblingly tried to articulate over the past week or so, it's not the 30,000 troop increase. Or rather, it's not just the troop increase. What a transformative figure like Barack Obama could be doing is breaking the status quo that makes "war as a way to keep the peace" seem so much less absurd than it actually is. To wit: the American government exported $154B worth of weaponry during the Bush administration, over half of which goes to developing nations without sustainable economies. When that weaponry is turned around and used to suppress dissent within the recipients' own countries, just what does it mean for the Barack Obama to say that human rights and free expression are of paramount concern to the United States? And when those very same countries have a tendency to produce terrorists that turn around and target America, just what does it mean to talk about our military might being the key to global security in an age of new threats? A kindergartener could figure out the flaws in this logic - but in any event you're crazy if you think that big business is merely an incidental ingredient in the whole morass. Obama could have taken the Nobel opportunity to acknowledge this and try to walk it back an inch - or at least correct the momentum of the last eight years - but he's not. Instead, he's just spreading strawberry jam on the same big pile of shit, and hoping to get through the week.
The President also made a big point of saying that the manner in which wars are fought is critical to maintaining moral authority. That's why, he said, he prohibited torture by American personnel. God damn it - even the Constitutional lawyer misses the point, after all this time. THERE ARE LAWS AGAINST TORTURE - HE DIDN'T NEED TO PROHIBIT IT, IT WAS ALREADY PROHIBITED. On torture, President Obama has actually made things worse. By not prosecuting crimes of torture from the last eight years, by suppressing the evidence of wrongdoing by claiming state secret authority, and overall by continuing to position the whole issue as a question of executive policy rather than law, he has reinforced the notion that on matters of security, what's right is right because the President says it's right, not because it's right. It's a classic Euthypro cop-out, written in fine print for the most powerful nation on earth - what matters isn't what the law says, only whether the President judges that following the law is appropriate on any given day. This continues to be a disgrace, and makes the Nobel an even starker irony than does the troop escalation itself.
What saddens me most about this, ironically, is how good Obama really is at catering to the sensibilities of progressives and idealists, or at least making them feel catered to. In his hands, the same old crap really does sound better than it used to, and people who wouldn't have accepted Bush or Cheney's assertions of "best of all bad options" are all too eager to give the new guy a break, since it seems like he's trying so darn hard. But nothing's really changed. Greenwald, as usual, puts it heartwrenchingly well:
To red state Republicans, war and its accompanying instruments (secrecy, executive power, indefinite detention) felt so good and right when justified by swaggering, unapologetic toughness and divinely-mandated purpose; to blue state Democrats, all of that feels just as good when justified by academic meditations on "just war" doctrine and when accompanied by poetic expressions of sorrow and reluctance. When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday: a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world.
This is why health care always mattered less to me, although I'm happy to see some small progress made on that front, tainted by corporate sell-out it may be. What's scarier to me is what the two major parties agree on - absurd corporate welfare, continually decreasing levels of transparency and oversight, and, it seems, endless and intractable war.
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