Glenn Greenwald: The (Thankfully) Missing Element From Obama’s Speech
Comparing video clips of George Bush’s 2002 West Point speech on Afghanistan with the one Barack Obama delivered last night, Rachel Maddow argues that Obama has now embraced the fundamentals of the dreaded “Bush Doctrine”: namely, we will fight wars even in countries that are not posing any threat to us in order to prevent some future threat that may (or may not) emerge. Rachel makes a persuasive albeit not conclusive case: like most Obama decisions, last night he incorporated enough of every side and paid homage to conflicting principles such that it’s impossible to identify what he really believes (“civilian trials are a fundamental American value and now we’ll deny them to many detainees” is quite similar to: “Afghanistan is in our absolute vital interest and we’ll start leaving in 18 months”). He’s convinced his admirers that this is a form of noble “pragmatism” but, far more often, it appears to be a mishmash of political calculations bereft of principle and plagued by numerous internal contradictions that make it impossible to understand, let alone defend. Everyone gets to read into it whatever they want to see.
While Obama’s speech last night largely comported to what his aides spent days anonymously previewing, there was one (pleasantly) unexpected aspect: he commendably dispensed with the propagandistic pretext that we are fighting in Afghanistan in order to deliver freedom and democracy to that country and to improve the plight of Afghan women. Many Democrats (the self-proclaimed “liberal hawks”) love to support American wars on the self-righteous ground that we’re going to drop enough Freedom Bombs to liberate millions and invade other countries in order to re-make other peoples’ cultures for their own good. In order to maximize support for his escalation, Obama — like Bush so often did — could easily have relied on that appeal to our national narcissism and exploited justifiable disgust for the Taliban in order to manipulate “liberal hawks” into supporting this war on human rights grounds. During the build-up to the speech, it was predicted by several influential Obama advisers that he would do exactly that. Indeed, when announcing his prior Afghanistan escalation in March, Obama played up the humanitarian rationale for this war.[more...]