Barack Obama Keeps Talking as if Someone Else Has Been Commander in Chief — apparently Continuing His Game of Machiavellian Public Deception

26 May 2013

Eventually, a man lacking a moral center will have difficulty persuasively pretending to have one

President Barack Obama’s recent speech against perpetual war is a good example of the phenomenon.

He spoke as if had not been Commander in Chief all these years.

He wanted us to believe that he had made little contribution to keeping the Military Industrial Complex happily ensconced in:

(i) killing people hither and yon in the absence of sound strategy

and

(ii) rolling over human and democratic rights in the process.

The President’s speech was a good example of the “Who me?” method of acting.

Reason magazine’s (libertarian) editor in chief Matt Welch saw the President’s performance the same way I did

He wrote:

Obama worries, rightly, that "in the absence of a strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war – through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments – will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways."

And yet at perpetual war we remain, altering our way of life by the day.

There was much to like in Obama's speech today if you like words, and share the broad worries he outlined . . . .

But the fact is Barack Obama is the president of the United States, and according to both the Constitution and especially the way executive power has accrued over the past century, Obama actually has quite a bit of latitude to impose his values on the waging of American war.

After 52 months in office, it's long since past time to stop judging the man by his words alone.

Kindly put, I think.

My own take is harsher

The President said absolutely nothing in his speech that indicates either recognition of the magnitutde of America’s state of perpetual war or a willingness to end it.

Most of the speech was an overly long and lying justification for having continued George W. Bush’s neoconservative embrace of unproductively aggressive militarism.

For example, how about this disingenuous gloss of his drone murder program?

Beyond the Afghan theater, we only target al Qaeda and its associated forces.

And even then, the use of drones is heavily constrained. America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists; our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute.

America cannot take strikes wherever we choose; our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty.

America does not take strikes to punish individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat.

And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set.

A Machiavellian conniver — “See my tears”

The President has proven himself to be a talented conniver, who constantly attempts to evade responsibility for his actions or omissions by throwing us frequent lines of eloquent BS.

It works most of the time. Which doesn’t say much for our level of interpersonal or geopolitical insight.

For example, to pull the wool over anti-militarist critics’ eyes, the President threw in the tear-soaked —“This is harder on me, than them guys I obliterated” — eye daubing rag:

Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in every war.

And for the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss.

For me, and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred throughout conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives.

Further — an assumption so flawed, that it is hard to believe that a person of the President’s intelligence missed it — and a throwaway straw man, who is holey enough to let a passel of freight trains through

Immediately following his “pity me” passage, President Obama continued to demonstrate just how much he is former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “evil” twin:

To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties — not just in our cities at home and our facilities abroad, but also in the very places like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu where terrorists seek a foothold.

Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes. So doing nothing is not an option.

I do not think that any of the President’s anti-militarist critics — like Colonel/Professor Andrew Bacevich and I — have ever suggested “doing nothing.”

What we question is whether doing “something” requires:

(a) blasting people all over the world on the slimmest of pretexts

and

(b) too frequently engaging the bulk of America’s military might to crush elusive gnats on sun baked walls,

while simultaneously

(c) guaranteeing the predictable backlash of anti-American hostility that will keep the our militarist actions flying into perpetuity.

In short . . . .

The President:

lied,

built a “doing nothing” strawman to cover his lie,

and

now pretends to want to reexamine his geopolitical premises away from a state of perpetual war.

In that latter concealing effort, he said:

So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.

We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Nothing like invoking the historically illustrious “Jimbo” Madison to make oneself appear to have stature and integrity that one actually lacks.

Despite throwing this bone to James Madison, everything President Obama said afterward justified the Bush-Cheney-Obama “bullet and missile” route to slaughtering success (pun intended).

This was not a Commander in Chief seriously examining the flaws in American policy or its depredations on human rights and constitutional law.

It was simply a deliberately misleading speech that someone might make to divert his critics from seeing truth.

The moral? — Do not count on the President to do anything worthwhile, during the rest of his presidency

President Obama is primarily concerned with maintaining the illusion of rectitude — to the same nauseating degree that the majority of his self-interested Democratic and Republican colleagues are.

The President’s goal for the rest of his term is, almost certainly, merely to promulgate the wrong-headed idea that he actually stood for something great. I doubt that future historians will be fooled.

Hot air of the President’s now characteristic kind rises and dissipates into nothingness.

The tragedy of President Obama’s era is that he was dropped into a pot of massive woes that sought Leadership of Lincolnesque caliber — but somehow, he evaded Destiny’s call. And he settled, instead, for what can be fairly called mediocrity’s responsibility-avoiding smallness.

It is a pity. For the man and the country.

PeteFree.com

Barack Obama Keeps Talking as if Someone Else Has Been Commander in Chief — apparently Continuing His Game of Machiavellian Public Deception