April 29, 2012 |
He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized). No one can
stop him or countermand his orders. He has a bevy of lawyers at his
beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions. And if he cares
to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no
matter where you may be on planet Earth.
He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel. You know,
the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating
the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then
leaves him behind to gum up the works.
As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids.
How could this be?
Crash-and-Burn Dreams and One That Came to Be
Sometimes to understand where you are, you need to ransack the past.
In this case, to grasp just how this country’s first
African-American-constitutional-law-professor-liberal Oval Office holder
became the most imperial of all recent imperial presidents, it’s
necessary to look back to the early years of George W. Bush’s
presidency. Who today even remembers that time, when it was common to
speak of the U.S. as the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,”
the only “sheriff” on planet Earth, and the neocons were boasting of an
empire-to-come greater than the British and Roman ones rolled together?
In those first high-flying years after 9/11, President Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney, and their top officials held three dreams of
power and dominance that they planned to make reality. The first was to
loose the U.S. military -- a force they
fervently believed
capable of bringing anybody or any state to heel -- on the Greater
Middle East. With it in the lead, they aimed to create a
generations-long Pax Americana in the region.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to be only the initial “cakewalk” in
a series of a shock-and-awe operations in which Washington would
unilaterally rearrange the oil heartlands of the planet, toppling or
cowing hostile regimes like the Syrians and the Iranians. (A
neocon quip
caught the spirit of that moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.
Real men want to go to Tehran.”) This, in turn, would position the U.S.
to control the planet in a historically unique way, and so prevent the
rise of any other great power or bloc of nations resistant to American
desires.
Their second dream, linked at the hip to the first, was to create a
generations-long Pax Republicana here at home. (“Everyone wants to go to
Kansas, but real men want to go to New York and LA.”) In that dream,
the Democratic Party, like the Iraqis or the Iranians, would be brought
to heel, a new Republican majority funded by corporate America would
rule the roost, and above it all would be perched a “
unitary executive,” a president freed of domestic constraints and capable -- by fiat, the
signing statement, or simply expanded powers -- of doing just about anything he wanted.
Though less than a decade has passed, both of those dreams already
feel like ancient history. Both crashed and burned, leaving behind a
Democrat in the White House, an Iraq without an American military
garrison, and a still-un-regime-changed Iran. With the arrival on
Bush’s watch of a global economic meltdown, those too-big-not-to-fail
dreams were relabeled disasters, fed down the memory hole, and are today
largely forgotten.
It’s easy, then, to forget that the Bush era wasn’t all
crash-and-burn, that the third of their hubristic fantasies proved a
remarkable, if barely noticed, success. Because that success never
fully registered amid successive disasters and defeats, it’s been
difficult for Americans to grasp the “imperial” part of the Obama
presidency.
Remember that Cheney and his cohorts took power in 2001 convinced
that, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, American presidents had been placed
in “chains.” As soon as 9/11 hit, they began, as they
put it,
to “take the gloves off.” Their deepest urge was to use “national
security” to free George W. Bush and his Pax Americana successors of any
constraints.
From this urge flowed the decision to launch a “Global War on Terror”
-- that is, a “wartime” with no possible end that would leave a
commander-in-chief president in the White House till hell froze over.
The construction of Guantanamo and the creation of “
black sites” from
Poland to
Thailand,
the president’s own private offshore prison system, followed naturally,
as did the creation of his own privately sanctioned form of (in)justice
and punishment, a
torture regime.
At the same time, they began expanding the realm of presidentially
ordered “covert” military operations (most of which were, in the end,
well publicized) -- from drone wars to the deployment of special
operations forces. These were signposts indicating the power of an
unchained president to act without constraint abroad. Similarly, at
home, the Bush administration began expanding what would
once have been
illegal surveillance of
citizens and other forms of presidentially inspired overreach. They
began, in other words, treating the U.S. as if it were part of an alien
planet, as if it were, in some sense, a foreign country and they the
occupying power.
With a cowed Congress and a fearful, distracted populace, they
undoubtedly were free to do far more. There were few enough checks and
balances left to constrain a war president and his top officials. It
turned out, in fact, that the only real checks and balances they felt
were internalized ones, or ones that came from within the national
security state itself, and yet those evidently did limit what they felt
was possible.
The Obama Conundrum
This, then, was what Barack Obama inherited on entering the Oval
Office: an expanding, but not yet fully expansive, commander-in-chief
presidency, which, in retrospect, seemed to fit him like a... glove. Of
course, he also inherited the Bush administration’s domestic failures
and those in the Greater Middle East, and they overshadowed what he’s
done with that commander-in-chief presidency.
It’s true that, with President Truman’s decision to go to war in
Korea in 1950, Congress’s constitutional right to declare war (rather
than rubberstamp a presidential announcement of the same) went by the
boards. So there’s a distinct backstory to our present imperial
presidency. Still, in our era, presidential war-making has become
something like a 24/7 activity.
Once upon a time, American presidents didn’t consider micro-managing a
permanent war state as a central part of their job description, nor did
they focus so unrelentingly on the U.S. military and the doings of the
national security state. Today, the president’s word is death just about
anywhere on the planet and he exercises that power with remarkable
frequency. He
appears in front of “the troops” increasingly often and his wife has made their wellbeing
part of
her job description. He has at his command expanded “covert” powers,
including his own private armies: a more militarized CIA and growing
hordes of special operations forces,
60,000 of them, who essentially make up a “covert” military inside the U.S. military.
In effect, he also has his own private intelligence outfits,
including most recently a newly formed Defense Clandestine Service at
the Pentagon focused on non-war zone intelligence operations
(especially, so the
reports go, against China and Iran). Finally, he has what is essentially his own
expanding private (robotic) air force: drones.
He can send his drone assassins and special ops troops just about
anywhere to kill just about anyone he thinks should die, national
sovereignty
be damned. He firmly established his “right” to do this by going after the worst of the worst,
killing
Osama bin Laden in Pakistan with special operations forces and an
American citizen and jihadi, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen with a
drone.
At the moment, the president is in the process of widening his
around-the-clock “covert” air campaigns. Almost unnoted in the U.S.,
for instance, American drones recently
carried out a strike
in the Philippines killing 15 and the Air Force has since announced a
plan to boost its drones there by 30%. At the same time, in Yemen, as
previously in the
Pakistani borderlands, the president has
just given
the CIA and the U.S. Joint Operations Command the authority to launch
drone strikes not just against identified “high-value” al-Qaeda
“targets,” but against general “
patterns of suspicious behavior.” So expect an
escalating
drone war there not against known individuals, but against groups of
suspected evildoers (and as in all such cases, innocent civilians as
well).
This is another example of something that would be forbidden at home,
but is now a tool of unchecked presidential power elsewhere in the
world: profiling.
As with Bush junior, the only thing that constrains the president and
his team, it seems, is some set of internalized checks and balances.
That’s undoubtedly why, before he ordered the successful drone
assassination of Awlaki, lawyers from the Pentagon, State Department,
National Security Council, intelligence agencies, and the Department of
Justice Office of Legal Counsel held meetings to
produce
a 50-page memorandum providing a “legal” basis for the president to
order the assassination of a U.S. citizen, a document, mind you, that
will never be released to the public.
In truth, at this point the president could clearly have ordered
those deaths without such a document. Think of it as the presidential
equivalent of a guilty conscience, but count on this: when those drones
start taking out “behaviors” in Yemen and elsewhere, there will be no
stream of 50-page memorandums generated to cover the decisions. That’s
because as you proceed down such a path, as your acts become ever more
the way of your world, your need to justify them (to yourself, if no one
else) lessens.
That path, already widening into a road, may, someday, become the
killing equivalent of an autobahn. In that case, making such decisions
will be ever easier for an imperial president as American society grows
yet
more detached
from the wars fought and operations launched in its name. In terms of
the president’s power to kill by decree, whether Obama gets his second
term or Mitt Romney steps into the Oval Office, the reach of the
commander-in-chief presidency and the “covert” campaigns, so secret they
can’t even be acknowledged in a court of law, so public they can be
boasted about, will only increase.
This is a dangerous development, which leaves us in the grip -- for
now -- of what might be called the Obama conundrum. At home, on issues
of domestic importance, Obama is a hamstrung, hogtied president,
strikingly checked and balanced. Since the passage of his embattled
healthcare bill, he has, in a sense, been in chains, able to accomplish
next to nothing of his domestic program. Even when trying to
exercise the unilateral powers that have increasingly been invested in presidents, what he can do on his own has proven exceedingly limited, a series of
tiny gestures
aimed at the largest of problems. And were Mitt Romney to be elected,
given congressional realities, this would be unlikely to change in the
next four years.
On the other hand, the power of the president as commander-in-chief
has never been greater. If Obama is the president of next to nothing on
the domestic policy front (but
fundraising for his second term), he has the powers
previously associated
with the gods when it comes to war-making abroad. There, he is the
purveyor of life and death. At home, he is a hamstrung weakling, at war
he is -- to use a term that has largely disappeared since the 1970s --
an imperial president.
Such contradictions call for resolution and that should worry us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment