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September 19, 2012
Tom Dispatch makes a good point about the trajectory of Obama's foreign policy. Recall that Obama was opposed to the use of hard military power of the Republican hawks in the George Bush administration and their national security state.
What has happened since 2008 is that Obama has:
expanded the country’s war in Afghanistan, struggled to keep American troops in Iraq (before fulfilling his predecessor’s pledge to withdraw), and oversaw escalating military interventions in Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere. [He has] failed to close Guantánamo, radically expanded the robotic assassination program, continued and expanded domestic surveillance, vigorously pursued and used the Espionage Act against more governmental whistleblowers than all other administrations combined (but prosecuted no one else in the National Security Complex for illegal activities), and kept his own extensive kill list, personally okaying assassinations.
Mitt Romney would be worse: more profligate military spending, even more troops to send to war, and possibly the addition of a new war or two to the American agenda---eg., restart a cold war with Russia, and possibly undertake a hot war against Iran.
As John Feffer says:
President Obama has largely preserved the post-9/11 fundamentals laid down by George W. Bush, which in turn drew heavily on a unilateralist and militarist recipe that top chefs from Bill Clinton on back merely tweaked.
America has no intention of giving up its empire or its massive machinery for waging war. The US is now “pivoting” to Asia with drones flying surveillance from Australia. Australia is part of the US's elaborate network of its own drone bases on foreign soil.
Seumas MIlne in The Guardian observes that:
Since launching the war on terror, the US and its allies have attacked and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq; bombed Libya; killed thousands in drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; imposed devastating sanctions; backed Israel's occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians to the hilt; carried out large-scale torture, kidnapping and internment without trial; maintained multiple bases to protect client dictatorships throughout the region; and now threaten Iran with another act of illegal war.
They assume that the U.S. has had nothing but good intentions for the past century, but the intended beneficiaries of its generosity don't get it solely because they've been misled by their leaders and media. Presumably drones don't exist the occupation of Iraq in 2003 was just a little misunderstanding,
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It's it's either the devil you know, or the devil you also know, but not quite as well...