[Peace-discuss] Obama's lying speech about the war
"E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森"
ewj at pigsqq.org
Tue May 28 00:03:13 UTC 2013
"You knew I was a rattlesnake when you picked me up"...
The problem is not with the Obot.
The problem is with the people.
...love, honour, and obey...
Some people see a demon behind every bush.
On 05/28/13 3:25, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
> CommonDreams.org
> Published on Monday, May 27, 2013 by The Guardian/UK
> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/27/obama-war-on-terror-speech>
>
>
>
> Obama's Terrorism Speech: Seeing What You Want To See
>
>
> Some eager-to-believe progressives heralded the speech as a
> momentous change, but Obama's actions are often quite different
> than his rhetoric
>
> by Glenn Greenwald <http://www.commondreams.org/glenn-greenwald>
>
> The hallmark of a skilled politician is the ability to speak to a
> group of people holding widely disparate views, and have all of them
> walk away believing they heard what they wanted to hear. Other than
> Bill Clinton, I've personally never seen a politician even in the same
> league as Barack Obama
> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/barack-obama> when it comes to that
> ability. His most consequential speeches are shaped by their
> simultaneous affirmation of conflicting values and even antithetical
> beliefs, allowing listeners with irreconcilable positions to conclude
> that Obama agrees with them.
>
> The highly touted speech
> <http://www.npr.org/2013/05/23/186305171/transcript-obama-addresses-counterterrorism-drones> Obama
> delivered last week on US terrorism policy was a master class in that
> technique. If one longed to hear that the end of the "war on terror"
> is imminent, there are several good passages that will be quite
> satisfactory. If one wanted to hear that the war will continue
> indefinitely, perhaps even in expanded form, one could easily have
> found that. And if one wanted to know that the president who has spent
> almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the
> world feels personal "anguish" and moral conflict as he does it,
> because these issues are so very complicated, this speech will be like
> a gourmet meal.
>
> No matter how good it made some eager-to-believe progressives feel,
> it's impossible rationally to assess Obama's future posture regarding
> the war on terror, secrecy and civil liberties expect by his actions.
>
> But whatever else is true, what should be beyond dispute at this point
> is that Obama's speeches have very little to do with Obama's actions,
> except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do.
> How many times does Obama have to deliver a speech embracing a set of
> values and polices
> <http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2008/07/obamas-fisa-shi/>, only
> to watch as he then proceeds to do the opposite
> <http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/07/09/71584/obama-campaign-vow-of-public-debate.html>,
> before one ceases to view his public proclamations as predictive of
> his future choices? Speeches, especially presidential ones, can be
> significant unto themselves in shaping public perceptions and setting
> the terms of the debate, so Obama's explicit discussion of the
> "ultimate" ending of the war on terror can be reasonably viewed as
> positive.
>
> But it signals nothing about what he actually will do. I'm genuinely
> amazed that there are still smart people who treat these speeches as
> though they do. As Esquire's Tom Junod put it after the speech
> <http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-drone-speech-lethal-president?click=pp>:
> "if the Lethal Presidency reminds us of anything, it's that we should
> be a long way from judging this president on his rhetoric or his
> portrayal of himself as a moral actor." The Atlantic's Conor
> Friedersdorf added
> <http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/a-skeptical-celebration-of-president-obamas-shifty-terrorism-speech/276205/> that
> Obama "has a long record of broken promises and misleading rhetoric on
> civil liberties, and it would be naive to assume that he'll follow
> through on everything he said on Thursday."
>
> What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is
> putting pretty packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The
> cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes coastal
> elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the
> Goodness of whatever he's selling, much as George W. Bush's
> swaggering, evangelical cowboy routine did for red state
> conservatives. The CIA presciently recognized
> <http://www.salon.com/2010/03/27/wikileaks/> this as a valuable asset
> back in 2008 when they correctly predicted that Obama's election would
> stem the tide
> <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_MnYI3_FRbbQ/S630NRVFxjI/AAAAAAAACVo/N_SuBb3sr-I/s1600/cia2.png> of
> growing antiwar sentiment in western Europe by becoming the new, more
> attractive face of war, thereby converting hordes of his admirers from
> war opponents into war supporters. This dynamic has repeated itself
> over and over in other contexts, and has indeed been of great value to
> the guardians of the status quo in placating growing public discontent
> about their economic insecurity and increasing unequal distribution of
> power and wealth. However bad things might be, we at least have a
> benevolent, kind-hearted and very thoughtful leader doing everything
> he can to fix it.
>
> The clear purpose of Obama's speech was to comfort progressives who
> are growing increasingly uncomfortable with his extreme secrecy, wars
> on press freedom, seemingly endless militarism and the like. For the
> most part, their discomfort is far more about the image being created
> of the politician they believed was unique and even transcendent than
> it is any substantive opposition to his policies. No progressive wants
> to believe that they placed such great trust and adoration in a
> political figure who is increasingly being depicted as some sort of
> warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney. That creates internal
> discomfort and even shame. This speech was designed to allow
> progressives once again to see Barack Obama as they have always wanted
> to see him, his policies notwithstanding: as a deeply thoughtful,
> moral, complex leader who is doing his level best, despite often
> insurmountable obstacles, to bring about all those Good Things that
> progressives thought they would be getting when they empowered him.
>
> The terrorism speech, when dissected, provided very little in the way
> of actual concrete substance. Its most heralded passage, as the ACLU
> quickly pointed out
> <http://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-comment-presidents-national-security-speech>,
> did nothing more than call for the "ultimate" repeal of the AUMF; "the
> time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore the
> rule of law is now," said the ACLU's executive director Anthony
> Romero, "not at some indeterminate future point." Moreover, he noted,
> "the president still claims broad authority to carry out targeted
> killings far from any battlefield, and there is still insufficient
> transparency."
>
> In lieu of substance, the speech was heavy on feel-good rhetoric,
> mostly designed to signal that unlike the mean and simplistic George
> Bush - who presumably pursued these policies thoughtlessly and
> simplistically - Obama experiences inner turmoil and deep moral and
> intellectual conflict as he pursues them. "For me, and those in my
> chain of command, those [civilian] deaths will haunt us as long as we
> live," the president claimed. He added that drones and other new
> weapons technologies "raise[] profound questions — about who is
> targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating
> new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under US and
> international law; about accountability and morality."
>
> This "he-struggles-so-very-much" conceit is one Obama officials have
> been pushing for awhile, as when they anonymous boasted to the New
> York Times
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all> about
> Obama's deep personal involvement in choosing the targets of his "kill
> list", something he insists upon because he is "a student of writings
> on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas" and wants to ensure compliance
> with those lofty principles. That same article quoted the supremely
> obsequious former Obama adviser Harold Koh as hailing torture
> <http://www.salon.com/2008/11/16/brennan/> advocate
> <http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/07/the-right-or-wrong-experience-for-the-job/by-nominating-john-brennan-obama-is-ignoring-war-crimes> and
> serial
> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/04/osama-bin-laden-killing-us-story-change>
> deceiver <http://www.salon.com/2011/07/19/drones/> John Brennan as "a
> person of genuine moral rectitude" who ensures that the "kill list" is
> accompanied by moral struggle: "It's as though you had a priest with
> extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a
> war," Koh said.
>
> Obama may do things you progressives find distasteful, but at least
> marvel at how thoughtful and torn up he is about it all. The New York
> Times' Ross Douthat had quite a good column
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/douthat-obamas-artful-anguish.html>this
> week about this preening pageantry. He aptly described the speech as
> "a dense thicket of self-justifying argument, but its central message
> was perfectly clear: Please don't worry, liberals. I'm not George W.
> Bush." Douthat explained:
>
> "This willingness to grapple with moral complexity has always been
> one of the things that Obama's admirers love about him, and even
> liberals who feel disappointed with his national security record
> still seem grateful for the change from George W. Bush. If we have
> to have an imperial president, their attitude seems to be, better
> to have one who shows some 'anguish over the difficult trade-offs
> that perpetual war poses to a free society' (as The New Yorker's
> Jane Mayer put it
> <http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/obama-speech-drones-closing-guantanamo.html> on
> Friday), rather than falling back on 'the secrecy and winking
> smugness of the past'. . . . .
>
> "I am not particularly nostalgic for the Bush era either. But
> Obama's Reinhold Niebuhr act comes with potential costs of its
> own. While the last president exuded a cowboyish certainty, this
> president is constantly examining his conscience in public — but
> if their policies are basically the same, the latter is no less of
> a performance. And there are ways in which it may be a more
> fundamentally dishonest one, because it perpetually promises
> harmonies that can't be achieved and policy shifts that won't
> actually be delivered.
>
> "That's a cynical reading on Obama's speech, but it feels like the
> right one. Listened to or skimmed, the address seemed to promise
> real limits on presidential power, a real horizon for the war on
> terror. But when parsed carefully, it's not clear how much
> practical effect its promises will have. . . .
>
> "There is no good reason to overpromise yet again. Where the
> United States can step back from a wartime footing, we absolutely
> should. But where we don't actually intend to, we should be
> forthright about it — rather than pretending that change is
> perpetually just around the corner, and behaving as though our
> choices are justified by how much anguish we express while making
> them."
>
> When it comes to liberals eager to be fooled, Douthat could easily
> have been talking here about his own newspaper's editors. Within
> minutes after the completion of Obama's speech, literally, the New
> York Times editorial page posted a lengthy and gushing editorial
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/opinion/obama-vows-to-end-of-the-perpetual-war.html?pagewanted=all> headlined
> "The End of Perpetual War". In their eyes, the speech was "the most
> important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks,
> a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America." It analyzed the
> speech section-by-section and insisted that each called for a "shift
> [that] is essential to preserving the democratic system and rule of
> law for which the United States is fighting, and for repairing its
> badly damaged global image." It concluded: "There have been times when
> we wished we could hear the right words from Mr. Obama on issues like
> these, and times we heard the words but wondered about his commitment.
> This was not either of those moments."
>
> How was the NYT able to post such a detailed and lengthy editorial
> about Obama's speech almost immediately upon its conclusion? Clearly,
> they were given a special preview of the speech by some administration
> official, who fed them exactly the message the White House wanted them
> to receive. And they ingested it fully. As one civil liberties lawyer
> put it to me, the NYT editors got snookered not despite the special
> access they received, but /because/ of it. Most of all, they got
> snookered because they wanted to, because - like so many progressives
> <http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/what-mattered-in-obamas-speech-today-ending-the-open-ended-war-on-terror/276208/>-
> they are eager to see Obama in the light in which they originally saw
> him. Nobody likes to believe they were fooled or tricked or so
> enthusiastically supported a politician who does things they find
> horrible.
>
> That's why a mere speech, filled with all sorts of mixed messages,
> leads the NYT editors to all but declare that Obama has heroically
> ended the war on terror - even though just one week before, one of his
> top military officials told the US senate
> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/17/endless-war-on-terror-obama> that
> the war would last at least another decade or two. After NYT Editorial
> board editor David Firestone posted
> <https://twitter.com/fstonenyt/status/337670091061747713> the NYT's
> editorial on Twitter and heralded the speech as "a momentous turning
> point, making clear an unending state of war is unsustainable," I
> asked him <https://twitter.com/fstonenyt/status/337672696206876672>:
> "Will it be 'momentous' if it's not followed up with decisive and
> prompt action?" His reply
> <https://twitter.com/fstonenyt/status/337672696206876672>: "Yes, I
> hope it doesn't turn out like universal pre-K or an infrastructure
> bank. But at least he set the bar at the right height."
>
> In contrast to the NYT's instant swooning, serious journalists and
> commentators - who weren't given special pre-speech access to a
> marketing pitch by the White House - began analyzing the speech's
> content and reached a much different conclusion. McClatchy's Leslie
> Clark and Jonathan Landay astutely noted
> <http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/23/192081/obama-promises-anew-to-transfer.html> that
> Obama's formulation for when drone strikes should be used was /broader
> than/ past government statements, which meant he "appeared to be
> laying groundwork for /an expansion /of the controversial targeted
> killings".
>
> The Brookings Institution's Benjamin Wittes similarly observed
> <http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/05/the-presidents-speech-a-quick-and-dirty-reaction-part-1/> that
> Obama's speech seemed written to align the president "as publicly as
> possible with the critics of the positions his administration is
> taking without undermining his administration's operational
> flexibility in actual fact." In other words, said Wittes (summarizing
> the vintage Obama rhetorical device), "the president sought to rebuke
> his own administration for taking the positions it has — but also to
> make sure that it could continue to do so." Slate's national security
> writer Fred Kaplanobserved
> <http://www.therecord.com/opinion/columns/article/939051--obama-says-nothing-new-about-drones> this
> morning that "the speech heralded nothing new when it comes to drone
> strikes." In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Jeremy Scahill
> argued this
> <http://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-nations-jeremy-scahill-to-cnn-obama-terrorism-speech-a-rebranding-of-bush-era-policies/> about
> the Obama speech:
>
> [I]t really is sort of just a rebranding of the Bush era policies
> with some legalese that is very articulately delivered from our
> constitutional law professor, Nobel Peace Prize-winning president.
> But effectively, Obama has declared the world a battlefield and
> reserves the right to drone bomb countries in pursuit of people
> against whom we have no direct evidence or who we're not seeking
> any indictment against."
>
>
> The national security reporter Michael Hastings said much the same
> thing
> <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/25/michael-hastings-obama_n_3336214.html> on
> MSNBC over the weekend ("That speech to me was essentially agreeing
> with President Bush and Vice President Cheney that we're in this
> neo-conservative paradigm, that we're at war with a jihadist threat
> that actually is not a nuisance but the most important threat we're
> facing today"), while Carnegie Mellon Professor Kiron Skinner on the
> same show said that "there was a lot of George W. Bush in that
> speech", as Obama spoke as though we are in a "long-term ideological
> struggle in a way that he's not talked about radical Islam before . ..
> where he's going will take him away from his liberal base."
>
> Ultimately, one can persuasively highlight passages in Obama's speech
> that support any or all of these perspectives. That's what makes it
> such a classic Obama speech. And that's the point: his speech had
> something for everyone, which is another way of saying that it offered
> nothing definitive or even reliable about future actions. No matter
> how good it made some eager-to-believe progressives feel, it's
> impossible rationally to assess Obama's future posture regarding the
> war on terror, secrecy and civil liberties expect by his actions.
> Until one sees actual changes in behavior and substance on those
> issues, cheering for those changes as though they already occurred or
> are guaranteed is the height of self-delusion.
>
> © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited
>
> Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national
> security issues for the Guardian. A former constitutional lawyer, he
> was until 2012 a contributing writer at Salon
> <http://www.salon.com/>. His most recent book is, *With Liberty and
> Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect
> the Powerful
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805092056?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>*.
> His other books include: *Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big
> Myths of Republican Politics
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307408663?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307408663&linkCode=xm2&tag=commondreams-20>*,
> *A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush
> Presidency
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307354288?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307354288&linkCode=xm2&tag=commondreams-20>*,
> and *How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a
> President Run Amok
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/097794400X?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=097794400X&linkCode=xm2&tag=commondreams-20>*.
> He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for
> Independent Journalism.
>
> more Glenn Greenwald <http://www.commondreams.org/glenn-greenwald>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Article printed from *www.CommonDreams.org <http://www.CommonDreams.org>*
> *Source URL:* http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/27-5
>
>
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