Obama’s Bush-League World: Is the Obama National Security Team a Pilotless Drone?
\nBy Tom Engelhardt, July 19, 2011
\nOriginally published in TomDispatch<\/p>\n
George W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She\u2019s already onto her next memoir, and yet it’s as if she’s been wiped from history, too? As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February and it hit the bestseller lists, but a few months later, where is he?<\/p>\n
And can anyone be surprised? They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about Saddam Hussein\u2019s weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing. The country imploded economically while they were at the helm. Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff. In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren\u2019t they wrong about? <\/p>\n
Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies. (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.) Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you\u2019re being honest, you’ll have to admit that one thing didn\u2019t happen: they didn\u2019t turn the page on us.<\/p>\n
They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9\/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn\u2019t. It\u2019s not just the Department of Homeland Security or that un-American word \u201chomeland,\u201d both of which are undoubtedly embedded in our lives forever; or the Patriot Act, now as American as apple pie; or Guantanamo which, despite a presidential promise, may never close; or all the wild, overblown fears of terrorism and the new security world that goes with them, neither of which shows the slightest sign of abating; or the National Security Agency\u2019s surveillance and spying on Americans which, as far as we can tell, is ongoing. No, it’s scores of Bush policies and positions that will clearly be with us until hell freezes over. Among them all, consider the Obama administration\u2019s updated version of that signature Bush invention, the Global War on Terror.<\/p>\n
Yes, Obama\u2019s national security officials threw that term to the dogs back in 2009, and now pursue a no-name global strategy that\u2019s meant not to remind you of the Bush era. Recently, the White House released an unclassified summary of its 2011 \u201cNational Strategy for Counterterrorism,\u201d a 19-page document in prose only a giant bureaucracy with a desire to be impenetrable could produce. (Don\u2019t bother to read it. I read it for you.) If it makes a feeble attempt to put a little rhetorical space between Obama-style counterterrorism and what the Bush administration was doing, it still manages to send one overwhelming message: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., are still striding amongst us, carrying big sticks and with that same crazed look in their eyes.<\/p>\n
The Global War on Terror (or GWOT in acronym-crazed Washington) was the bastard spawn of the disorientation and soaring hubris of the days after the 9\/11 attacks, which set afire the delusional geopolitical dreams of Bush, Cheney, their top national security officials, and their neocon supporters. And here\u2019s the saddest thing: the Bush administration\u2019s most extreme ideas when it comes to GWOT are now the humdrum norm of Obama administration policies — and hardly anyone thinks it\u2019s worth a comment. …more<\/a><\/p>\n