Obomber: Image & Reality

The image:

"Against a backdrop of stars and stripes and presidential seal flags, Obama stood at the podium at the White House for the very last time. Over eight years, at this spot, he has addressed the nation through highs and lows, sometimes choking with emotion when responding to incidents of gun violence." (Barack Obama's final press conference pep talk: 'I think we're going to be OK', theguardian.com,

The reality:

"As President Obama leaves office, much of his foreign policy record remains shrouded in the symbolism that has been the hallmark of his presidency. The persistence of Obama's image as a reluctant war-maker and a Nobel Peace Prize winner has allowed Donald Trump and his cabinet nominees to claim that Obama has underfunded the military and been less than aggressive in his use of US military might. Nothing could be further from the truth, and their claims are clearly designed only to justify even more extravagant military spending and more aggressive threats and uses of force than those perpetrated under Mr Obama's 'disguised, quiet, media-free' war policy.

"The reality is that Obama has increased US military spending beyond the post-World War II record set by President George W. Bush. Now that Obama has signed the military budget for FY2017, the final record is that Obama has spent an average of $653.6 billion per year, outstripping Bush by an average of $18.7 billion per year (in 2016 dollars). In historical terms, after adjusting for inflation, Obama's military spending has been 56% higher than Clinton's, 16% higher than Reagan's, and 42% more than the US Cold War average, when it was justified by military competition with a real peer competitor in the Soviet Union. By contrast, Russia now spends one-tenth of what we are pouring into military forces, weapon-building and war.

"What all this money has paid for is the polar opposite of what most of Obama's supporters thought they were voting for in 2008. Behind the iconic image of a hip, sophisticated celebrity-in-chief with strong roots in modern urban culture, lies a calculated contrast between image and reality that has stretched our country's neoliberal experiment in 'managed democracy' farther than ever before and set us up for the previously unthinkable 'post-truth' presidency of Donald Trump.

"Obama's doctrine of covert and proxy war was modeled on the Phoenix Program in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and Ronald Reagan's proxy wars in Central America in the 1980s. It involved a massive expansion of US special operations forces, now deployed to 138 different countries, compared with only 60 when Obama took office. As senior military officers told the Washington Post in June 2010, the Obama administration allowed, 'things that the previous administration did not,' and, They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.' Whenever possible, US forces have recruited and trained proxy forces to do the actual fighting and dying, from the Iraqi government's Shiite death squads to Al Qaeda splinter groups in Libya and Syria (supporting 'regime change' projects in those countries) to mercenaries serving Arab monarchies and seemingly endless cannon fodder for the war in Afghanistan.

"Obama's ten-fold expansion of drone strikes further reduced US casualties relative to numbers of foreigners killed. This fostered an illusion of peace and normality for Americans in the homeland even as the death toll inflicted by America's post-9/11 wars almost certainly passed the two million mark. The targets of these covert and proxy wars are not just guerrilla fighters or 'terrorists' but also the 'infrastructure' or 'civilian support mechanism' that supports guerrillas with food and supplies, and the entire shadow government and civil society in areas that resist domination. As a US officer in Iraq explained to Newsweek in 2005, 'The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.' [...]

"Obama's failure was the result of his deference to generals, admirals, the CIA and hawkish advisers like secretary of State Hillary Clinton and ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, and of his blind faith in US military power. But war was never a legitimate or effective response to terrorism. The misuse of military force has only spread violence and chaos across the Muslim world and spawned an explosive mix of political disintegration, rule by militias and warlords, a dizzying proliferation of armed groups with different interests and loyalties and, ultimately, more blowback for the West. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, Qatar and other 'allies' have been only too eager to exploit and redirect our aggression against their own enemies: Iran, Syria, Libya; and different ethnic groups, minorities and political movements in what was, for centuries, a diverse, tolerant region of the world. The US has become a blind giant stumbling through a thick forest of shadows and unseen dangers, striking out with its devastating war machine at the instigation of self-serving allies and the same dark forces in its own 'intelligence' bureaucracy who have stirred up trouble, staged coups and unleashed war in country after country for 70 years. The only consistent beneficiary in all this death, destruction and chaos is the 'military industrial complex' that President Eisenhower warned us against in his farewell address in 1961.

"In 2012, I researched and wrote about how General Dynamics CEO Lester Crown and his Chicago family backed and bankrolled the political career of Barack Obama. As manufacturers of Virginia class submarines, Arleigh Burke and Zumwalt destroyers and littoral combat ships (all programs saved, revived or expanded by Obama) as well as other types of munitions, the Crown family's patronage of Barack Obama has proven to be a profitable investment, from the violence and chaos in the Muslim world to the New Cold War with Russia to the 'pivot' to the South China Sea. Now Mr Trump has nominated General Dynamics board member, General James 'Mad Dog' Mattis as Secretary of Defense, despite his responsibility for illegal rules of engagement and systematic war crimes in Iraq, an obvious conflict of interest with the millions he has earned at General Dynamics and clear laws that require civilian control of the military.

"When will we ever learn to tell the difference between corrupt warmongers like Obama and Mattis and progressive leaders who will let us live in peace with our neighbors around the world, even at the expense of General Dynamics' profits?" (Obama's bombing legacy, Nicolas J.S. Davies, antiwar.com, 18/1/17)