Has Obama institutionalized Bush鈥檚 worst?
Many expected that President Obama would dismantle President Bush's war on terror and the assault on civil liberties at home in its name. But the terrorist threat still loomed and public pressure to protect the homeland remained. So did the dark precedents.
Many expected that President Obama would dismantle President Bush's war on terror and the assault on civil liberties at home in its name. But the terrorist threat still loomed and public pressure to protect the homeland remained. So did the dark precedents.
Dan Froomkin has returned to blogging at Glenn Greenwald鈥檚 Intercept. His debut posting is a doozy:
Like Froomkin (and Greenwald), I鈥檝e long been concerned about these issues and have been consistent. That is, I criticized the Bush excesses, despite having voted for him twice, and yet defend Obama from over-the-top charges on the same issues, despite having voted against him twice. I am, however, less idealistic on this issues than either Froomkin or Greenwald.
That Obama would largely continue the Bush policies was predictable and predicted. I wrote several posts between Election Day 2008 and Inauguration Day 2009 to the effect that, despite lofty and sincere campaign rhetoric, President Obama would be much more like President Bush than Candidate Obama on these issues. First, because sitting presidents seldom give up power. Second, because sitting in the big chair and being responsible for the security of your country is fundamentally different from being a candidate for said office, much less a US senator (or a blogger).
Bush and his team didn鈥檛 launch the Global War on Terrorism, open Gitmo, torture a handful of suspected terrorist leaders, start a massive electronic data scooping operation, and skirt聽the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions out of evil intent. They did so under the enormous pressures of the post-9/11 environment and frustrations that American and international laws and norms were not designed to deal with an incredibly dangerous, stateless, terrorist network leveraging an emerging telecommunications revolution.
By the time Obama took office in 2009, most of the post-9/11 fervor had died down and the Iraq fiasco had soured some of the public鈥檚 support for military adventurism. The Abu Ghraib scandal, abuses at Gitmo, and Supreme Court decisions had reminded us about the value of following our ideals. The Bush administration had long since ended our torture policy, for example.
Still, the terrorist threat loomed and public pressure to keep taking the fight to the bad guys and to protect the homeland remained. While I opposed doubling down in Afghanistan and thought the Surge an incredibly cynical ploy, it鈥檚 perfectly understandable why a new president 鈥� particularly a Democratic president 鈥� felt he had to do it. Likewise, while I鈥檝e long thought the drone war counterproductive, its appeal to a commander-in-chief is obvious.
Moreover, some perspective is in order. While it鈥檚 absolutely essential that the Greenwalds, Froomkins, and even Joyners continue to point out when our practices fall short of our ideals 鈥� whether because doing so impinges on our own liberty, diminishes our national soft power, or is simply counterproductive to our strategic aims 鈥� it鈥檚 hardly as if Bush and Obama are the worst offenders in this regard. Certainly, the worst excesses of聽the GWOT pale in comparison with the firebombing of Dresden and rounding up our Japanese citizens into internment camps.
James Joyner is editor of the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.