[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Tom Engelhardt: Charisma and the Imperial
Presidency
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Wed Jun 24 16:02:59 CDT 2009
Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet?
quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?
"I act a bit" audacia, indeed.
On 6/24/2009 3:32 PM, Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
>
> Depressing.
> --Jenifer
>
> *Obama Looses the Manhunters*
> *Charisma and the Imperial Presidency*
> By Tom Engelhardt
>
> Let's face it, even Bo is photogenic
> <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedishrag/2009/04/the-new-obama-first-dog-is-named-bo-and-hes-a-cutie.html>,
> charismatic. He's a camera hound. And as for Barack, Michelle,
> Sasha, and Malia
> <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/20/sasha-and-malia-obama-ina_n_159499.html>
> -- keep in mind that we're now in a first name culture -- they all
> glow on screen.
> Before a camera they can do no wrong. And the president himself,
> well, if you didn't watch his speech
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html>
> in Cairo, you should have. The guy's impressive. Truly. He can
> speak to multiple audiences
> <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF06Ak01.html> -- Arabs,
> Jews, Muslims <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090629/cole>,
> Christians, as well as a staggering range of Americans -- and
> somehow just about everyone comes away hearing something they
> like, feeling he's somehow on /their/ side. And it doesn't even
> feel like pandering. It feels like thoughtfulness. It feels like
> intelligence.
> For all I know -- and the test of this is still a long,
> treacherous way off -- Barack Obama may turn out to be the best
> pure politician we've seen since at least Ronald Reagan, if not
> Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He seems to have Roosevelt's same
> unreadable ability to listen and make you believe he's with you
> (no matter what he's actually going to do), which is a skill not
> to be whistled at.
> Right now, he and his people are picking off
> <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22636.html> the last
> Republican moderates via a little party-switching
> <http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1894394,00.html>
> and some well-crafted
> <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/02/john-mchugh-gop-congressm_n_210192.html>
> appointments, and so driving that party and its conservative base
> absolutely nuts, if not into extreme southern isolation
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/13/AR2009061301209.html?hpid=topnews>.
> In this sense, his first Supreme Court pick was little short of a
> political stroke of brilliance, whatever she turns out to do on
> the bench. Whether the opposition "wins" (which they won't) or
> loses in any attempt to block her nomination, they stand to
> further alienate a key voting bloc, Hispanics. Now 9%
> <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1904136,00.html>
> of voters, Hispanics went for Obama in the last election by a
> staggering 35-point margin. Next time their heft might even bring
> solidly red-state Texas closer to in-play status in the two-party
> system. In other words, the president has left his opponents in a
> situation where they can't win for losing.
> *Mix Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan...*
> All this is little short of amazing, particularly if put into even
> the most modest historical context.
> If, in a Star-Trekkian mode -- hand me the "red matter," Mr.
> Spock! -- you could transport yourself back to early 2003 and tell
> just about any American what's coming, you might have found
> yourself institutionalized. If you had said that the new norm
> would be a black president with Reagan-like popularity
> <http://www.pollingreport.com/obama_fav.htm>, Kennedy-like
> charisma, and Roosevelt-like skills in the political arena,
> leading a majority Democratic Congress in search of universal
> health care, solutions to global warming, energy conservation, and
> bullet trains, your listener might, at best, have responded with
> his or her own joke: "A priest, a rabbi, and a penguin walk into a
> bar..."
> After all, back then, before two "hurricanes"
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/21843/the_reconstruction_of_new_oraq>
> -- the invasion of Iraq and Katrina -- began the process of
> turning our American world upside down, the Bush administration
> seemed to be riding ever higher globally and the Republican Party
> even higher than that at home. Back then, the neocons were
> consumed
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/101850/bush_s_faith_and_the_middle_east_aflame>
> with imperial dreams of shock-and-awe-style eternal global
> conquest and domination ("Everyone wants to go
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/opinion/18KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&position=top>
> to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran"); and the President's
> "brain," Karl Rove, now exiled to the opinion p ages
> <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124467554761003983.html> of the
> /Wall Street Journal/, was convinced that he was nailing down a
> domestic /Pax Republicana/ for generations to come.
> And at that moment, who would have denied that things would turn
> out just that way? So don't let anyone tell you that history
> doesn't have its surprises. A black guy with the middle name of
> "Hussein," a liberal Chicago politician from -- in a phrase
> Republicans then regularly spit out, as if saying "Democratic" was
> too much effort -- the "Democrat Party"? I don't think so.
> And yet, in mid-June 2009, less than five months into the Obama
> presidency, can you even remember that era before the dawn of time
> when people were wondering what it would be like for an
> African-American family to inhabit the White House? Would American
> voters allow it? Could Americans take it?
> You betcha!
> *Being President*
> All that said, let's not forget reality. Barack Obama did not win
> an election to be president of Goodwill Industries, or the YMCA,
> or the Ford Foundation. He may be remarkable in many ways, but he
> is also president of the United States which means that he is head
> honcho for the globe's single great garrison state which now, to a
> significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future war.
>
>
> He is today the proprietor
> <http://www.motherjones.com/military-maps> of -- to speak only of
> the region extending from North Africa to the Chinese border that
> the Bush loyalists used to call "the Greater Middle East" --
> American bases, or facilities, or prepositioned military material
> (or all of the above) at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, in
> Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq (and
> Iraqi Kurdistan), Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan (where the U.S.
> military and the CIA share Pakistani military facilities), and a
> major Air Force facility on the British-controlled Indian Ocean
> island of Diego Garcia.
> Some U.S. bases in these countries are microscopic and solitary,
> but others like Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, both in Iraq, are
> gigantic installations in a web of embedded bases. According to an
> expert
> <http://www.motherjones..com/politics/2008/08/americas-unwelcome-advances>
> on the subject, Chalmers Johnson, the Pentagon's most recent
> official count of U.S. "sites" (i.e. bases) abroad is 761, but
> that does not include "espionage bases, those located in war
> zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous
> facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which
> the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude -- e.g. in
> Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan."
> In January when he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also
> inherited the largest embassy
> <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/05/us-inaugurates-new-700-mi_n_155214.html>
> on Earth, built in Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial
> proportions
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174789/the_mother_ship_lands_in_iraq>
> as a regional command center. It now houses what are politely
> referred to as 1,000 "diplomats." Recent news reports indicate
> that such a project wasn't just an aberration of the Bush era.
> Another embassy, just as gigantic, expected to house
> <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/islamabad-to-get-giant-us-embassy/article1156484/>
> "a large military and intelligence contingent," will be
> constructed <http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/68952.html> by
> the Obama administration in its new war capital, Islamabad,
> Pakistan. Once the usual cost overruns are added in, it may turn
> out be the first billion-dollar embassy. Each of these command
> centers will, assumedly, anchor the American presence in the
> Greater Middle East.
> Barack Obama is also now the commander-in-chief of 11 aircraft
> carrier strike groups
> <http://www.military.com/news/article/navy-news/washington-departs-on-summer-deployment.html?col86032311124>,
> which regularly patrol the planet's sea lanes. He sits atop a U.S.
> Intelligence Community (yes, that's what our intelligence crew
> like to call themselves) of at least 16 squabbling, overlapping
> agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other's throats
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/10/AR2009061003392_pf.html>.
> They have a cumulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174793/robert_dreyfuss_the_pentagon_s_blank_chec>
> or more
> <http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3A27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3A07d043ca-ceaf-4d4b-a260-7a4c0f59d581&plckCommentSortO%20%20rder=TimeStampAscending>.
> (Imagine a power so obsessively consumed by the very idea of
> "intelligence" that it is willing to support 16 sizeable separate
> outfits doing such work, and that's not even counting various
> smaller offices dedicated to intelligence activities..)
> The new president will preside over a country which now ponies up
> almost half <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174884> the world's
> total military expenditures. His 2010 estimated Pentagon budget
> will be marginally higher than the last staggering one from the
> Bush years at $664 billion
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175045>. (The real figure, once
> military funds stowed away in places like the Department of Energy
> are included, is actually significantly larger.)
> He now inhabits a Washington in which deep-thinking consists of a
> pundit like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution whining
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/09/AR2009060902647.html?hpid=opinionsbox1>
> that these bloated sums are, in fact, too little to "maintain"
> U.S. forces (a budgetary increase of 7-8% per year for the next
> decade would, he claims, be just adequate); in which
> forward-looking means Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
> reorienting military spending toward preparations
> <http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/05/world/fg-gates5> for
> fighting one, two, many Afghanistans; and in which out-of-the-box,
> futuristic thinking means letting the blue-skies crew at DARPA
> (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) loose on far-out
> problems like how to turn "programmable matter"
> <http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/universal-rubiks-cube-could-become-pentagon-shapeshifter/>
> into future Transformer-like weapons of war.
> While Obama enthusiasts can take pride in the appointment of some
> out-of-the-box thinkers in domestic areas, including energy,
> health, and the science of the environment, in two crucial areas
> his appointments are pure old-line Washington and have been so
> from the first post-election transitional moments.. His key
> economic players and advisors are largely a crew of former
> Clintonistas, or Clintonista wannabes or protégés like Secretary
> of the Treasury Tim Geithner. They are distinctly
> inside-the-boxers, some of them responsible for the thinking that,
> in the 1990s, led directly to this catastrophic economic moment.
> As for foreign policy, had the November election results been
> reversed, Obama's top team of today could just as easily have been
> appointed
> <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/44551?cp=6> by
> Senator John McCain. National Security Advisor James Jones was
> actually a McCain friend
> <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/11/general-james-jones-close_n_106482.html>,
> Gates
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174814/roger_morris_the_cia_and_the_gates_legacy>
> someone he admired, and Hillary Clinton a figure he could well
> have picked for a top post after a narrow election victory, had he
> decided to reach out to the Democrats. As a group, Obama's key
> foreign policy figures and advisors are traditional players in the
> national security state and pre-Bush-style Washington guardians of
> American power, thinking globally in familiar ways.
> *General Manhunter*
> And let's be careful not to put all of this in the passive voice
> either when it comes to the new president. In both of these areas,
> he may have felt somewhat unsure of himself and so slotted in the
> old guard around him as a kind of political protection.
> Nonetheless, this hasn't just happened to him. He didn't just
> inherit the presidency. He went for it. And he isn't just sitting
> atop it. He's actively using it. He's wielding power. In foreign
> policy terms, he's settling in -- and despite his Cairo speech and
> various hints of change on subjects like relations with Iran, in
> largely predictable ways.
>
>
> He may, for example, have declared a sunshine policy
> <http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/transparency/baking-transparency-into-gover.html>
> when it comes to transparency in government, but in his war
> policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is
> already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of
> death. He's just appointed
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074/the_pressure_of_an_expanding_war>
> a general, Stanley A. McChrystal, as his Afghan commander. From
> 2003-2008, McChrystal ran a special operations outfit in Iraq (and
> then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention of
> it. In those years, its operatives were torturing
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html>,
> abusing, and killing Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted
> assassination program on a large scale
> <http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/09/09/iraq.secret/>. It was,
> for those who remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in
> which possibly hundreds of enemies were assassinated:
> al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types, but also Sunni insurgents, and Sadrists
> (not to speak of others, since informers always settle scores and
> turn over their own personal enemies as well).
> Although he's now being touted in the press as the man to bring
> the real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and "protect"
> the Afghan population in the bargain), his actual field is
> "counter-terrorism."
> <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KE14Df01.html> He spoke
> the right words
> <http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/8/obamas_pick_to_hear_afghan_war>
> to Congress during his recent confirmation hearings, but pay no
> attention.
> The team he's now assembling in Washington to lead his operations
> in Afghanistan (and someday maybe Pakistan) tells you what you
> really need to know. It's filled with special operations types.
> The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in
> special ops work. At the same time, reports
> <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/05/pentagon-quietly-sending-special-operators-afghanistan-strategy-revamp/>
> Rowan Scarborough at Fox News, an extra 1,000 special operations
> troops are now being "quietly" dispatched to Afghanistan, bringing
> the total number there to about 5,000. Keep in mind that it's been
> the special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night
> raids and air strikes, who have been involved
> <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/rumsfelds-renegade-unit-blamed-for-afghan-deaths-1685704.html>
> in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which
> continue to enrage Afghans.
> Note, by the way, that while the president is surging into
> Afghanistan 21,000 troops and advisors (as well as those special
> ops forces), ever more civilian diplomats and advisors, and ever
> larger infusions of money, there is now to be a command surge as
> well. General McChrystal, according to a recent /New York Times/
> article
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/world/asia/11command.htm>, has
> "been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of
> subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans... [He]
> is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate
> between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three
> years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown
> in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an
> approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five
> years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan."
> Like the new mega-embassy in Pakistan, this figure -- the
> Spartans, after all, only needed 300 warriors
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae> at
> Thermopylae -- tells us a great deal about the top-heavy manner in
> which the planet's super-garrison state fights its wars.
> So, this is now truly Obama's war, about to be run by his chosen
> general
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/us/politics/12memo.html>, a
> figure from the dark side. Expect, then, from our sunshine
> president's men an ever bloodier secret campaign of so-called
> counter-terror (though it's essence is likely to be terror, pure
> and simple), as befits an imperial power trying to hang on to the
> Eastern reaches of the Greater Middle East.
> The new crew aren't counterinsurgency warriors, but -- a term that
> has only recently entered our press -- "manhunters."
> <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/13/politics/washingtonpost/main5011174.shtml>
> And don't forget, President Obama is now presiding over an
> expanding war in which "manhunters" engaging in systematic
> assassination programs will not only be on the ground but, thanks
> to the CIA's escalating program
> <http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2009/06/12/cia-secrecy-on-drone-attacks-data-hides-abuses/>
> of targeted assassination by robot aircraft
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175056>, in the skies over the
> Pakistani tribal borderlands.
> For those who care to remember, it was into counter-terrorism and
> an orgy of manhunting, abuse, and killing that the Vietnam era
> version of "counterinsurgency" dissolved as well.
> *Into the Charnel House of History*
> A neologism coined for the expanding Afghan war has recently come
> into widespread use: Af-Pak (for Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater of
> Operations). But the coining of neologisms shouldn't just be left
> to those in Washington, so let me suggest one that hints at one
> possible new world over which our newest president may
> unexpectedly preside: Ir-Af-Pak. Let it stand, conveniently, for
> the Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater of Operations -- a
> neologism that catches the perilously expansionist and
> devolutionary possibilities of our moment.
> Media organizations in increasingly tight financial straits sense
> the explosive nature of this expansionist moment and, even as they
> are fleeing Iraq (and former bureaus in so many other places),
> like the president, they are doubling down and piling into
> Afghanistan and Pakistan. But don't count Iraq pacified yet. It
> remains an uneasy, dangerous, explosive place as, in fact, does
> the Greater Middle East. Worse yet, the Af-Pak War may not itself
> be done expanding. It could still, for instance, seep into one or
> more of the Central Asian 'stans, among other places, and already
> has made it into catastrophic Somalia, while a shaky Yemen could
> be swept into the grim festivities.
> Finally, let's return to that "dream team" being put together by
> Obama's man in Afghanistan. That team of Spartans, according to
> the /New York Times/, is being formed with, minimally, a
> three-year horizon. This in itself is striking. After all, the
> Afghan War started in November 2001. So when the shortest possible
> Afghan tour of duty of the 400 is over, it will have been going on
> for more than 10½ years -- and no one dares to predict that, three
> years from now, the war will actually be at an end.
> Looked at another way, the figure cited should probably not be one
> decade, but three. After all, our Afghan adventure
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2033/which_war_is_this_anyway_>
> began in 1980, when, in the jihad against the Soviets, we were
> supporting some of the very same fundamentalist figures
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175010> now allied with the
> Taliban and fighting us in Afghanistan -- just as, once upon a
> time, we looked positively upon the Taliban; just as, once, we
> looked positively upon Saddam Hussein, who was for a while seen as
> our potential bulwark in the Middle East against the
> fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran. (Remarkably enough, only
> Iran has, until this moment, retained its position as our regional
> enemy over these decades.)
> What a record, then, of blood and war, of great power politics and
> imperial hubris, of support for the heinous (including various
> fundamentalist groups and grim, authoritarian Middle Eastern
> regimes who remain our allies to this day). What a tale of
> imperial power frittered away and treasure squandered. Truly,
> Rudyard Kipling would have been able to do something with this.
> As for me, I find myself in awe of these decades of folly. Thirty
> years in Afghanistan, it staggers the imagination. What tricks
> does that land play with the minds of imperial Great-Gamers? Maybe
> it has something to do with those poppies. Who knows? I'm no
> Kipling, but I am aware that this sorry tale has taken up almost
> half of my lifetime with no end in sight.
> In the meantime, our new president has loosed the manhunters.
> /His/ manhunters. This is where charisma disappears into the
> charnel house of history. Watch out.
> /Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of //the American Empire Project/
> <http://www.americanempireproject.com/>/, runs the Nation
> Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of //The End of
> Victory Culture/
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>/,
> a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, //The
> Last Days of Publishing/
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1558495061/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>/.
> He also edited //The World According to TomDispatch: America in
> the New Age of Empire/
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844672573/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>/
> (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.</ I>/
> /[*Note for readers:* Credit where credit's due: the neologism,
> "Ir-Af-Pak," is actually the invention of Jonathan Schell. A small
> bow of appreciation to him for handing it off to me and another
> bow to Jim Peck for some inspired suggestions. Thanks as well to
> Alfred McCoy
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175080/alfred_mccoy_back_to_the_future_in_torture_policy>
> for helping to bring me up to speed on the meaning of General
> McChrystal's Iraq activities. In addition, the filmmaker Robert
> Greenwald's website Rethink Afghanistan
> <http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog/> (also the name of his new
> film) is starting to post clips about Afghan casualties of the
> U.S. air war
> <http://www.navytimes.com/news/2009/06/airforce_airstrikes_061209w/>.
> These will be incorporated in to part four of his Afghan War film,
> being released part by part on-line. Because we see so little of
> this, these initial clips are sobering and well worth viewing. To
> do so, click here <http://rethinkafghanistan.com/cc1.php>, here
> <http://rethinkafghanistan.com/cc2.php>, and here
> <http://rethinkafghanistan.com/cc4.php>.]/
> /Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt/
> /= /
> /
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Make your summer sizzle with fast and easy recipes
> <http://food.aol.com/grilling?ncid=emlcntusfood00000003> for the
> grill. /
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
Skipped content of type multipart/related
More information about the Peace-discuss
mailing list