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In
Counterterrorism Speech, Obama Hints at Danger of
American Dictatorship
By
Patrick Martin
December 07,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WSWS"
-
In a speech delivered
Tuesday to a military audience at MacDill Air Force Base
in Tampa, Florida, President Barack Obama made a veiled
warning about the threat to American democracy posed by
15 years of unending war.
The speech,
delivered at a base that headquarters US special
operations forces, was a defense of his administration’s
own record, little more than six weeks before Obama
turns over the White House to Donald Trump. The
departing commander-in-chief criticized specific
policies associated with Trump, including support for
torture and unilateral US military action, without
naming his successor.
Obama began by
acknowledging that when he leaves office January 20, “I
will become the first president of the United States to
serve two full terms during a time of war,” an assertion
that his audience applauded.
He reiterated
his confidence in the military, declaring, “I believe
that the United States military can achieve any mission;
that we are, and must remain, the strongest fighting
force the world has ever known.” This too, was greeted
with applause.
The bulk of the
speech, however, consisted of drawing lessons from the
struggle against Al Qaeda and ISIS, most of them
presented as warnings against making the “war on terror”
the focal point of American national-security policy.
Terrorists “don’t pose an existential threat to our
nation,” and therefore do not require an all-out
military mobilization on the scale of World War II or
the Cold War, he argued.
He also warned
that “we cannot follow the path of previous great
powers, who sometimes defeated themselves through
over-reach.” That was why, he said, he had withdrawn the
bulk of US ground troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, so
that they would be available elsewhere—i.e., against
Russia and China, although he did not cite these as
targets for future US military operations.
Obama’s main
focus was the impact of the “war on terror” on
democratic procedures and the potential transformation
of the United States into a garrison state. “These
terrorists can never directly destroy our way of life,”
he said, “but we can do it for them if we lose track of
who we are and the values that this nation was founded
upon.”
One of those
values was opposition to torture, he stressed,
implicitly rebuking President-elect Trump, who has
proclaimed his support for waterboarding and other forms
of torture during his campaign, and who has appointed a
pro-torture congressman, Mike Pompeo, to head the CIA.
He also opposed
efforts to impose religious tests on immigrants and
refugees, to single out American Muslims for
discrimination or repression, and to use the US military
for “grabbing the resources of those we defeated.”
These sallies
were all aimed at statements made by Trump during the
election campaign. Without drawing any explicit
connection, Obama then cited the Nuremberg Tribunals
after World War II, at which Nazi leaders were found
guilty of war crimes and executed or imprisoned.
The colossal
hypocrisy of Obama’s speech, and the absurdity of his
pose as the defender of “the rule of law” and democratic
rights, are underscored by reference to the Nuremberg
Tribunals. What Obama did not mention is the declaration
of the chief prosecutor at the tribunal, US Supreme
Court Justice Robert Jackson, that the basic crime
alleged against the accused Nazi leaders was the
planning and execution of a war of aggression, from
which, Jackson said, all the other war crimes flowed. By
this standard, the top officials of the Obama
administration, including Obama himself, deserve to be
hauled before a new tribunal to face war crimes charges.
Obama concluded
with a more general warning over the impact of
protracted war, with each new military operation
justified by reference to the now-distant events of
September 11, 2001. “Democracies should not operate in a
state of permanently authorized war,” he said. “That’s
not good for our military, it’s not good for our
democracy.”
While his
explicit argument was that Congress should pass a new
Authorization for the Use of Military Force against
ISIS, rather than leaving the president to rely on the
authority dating back to 9/11, the implications of these
comments were more sweeping. They recall the speech he
delivered in May 2013 on the dimensions of the “war on
terror,” when he declared, “We have to be mindful of
James Madison’s warning that no nation could preserve
its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
At the time of
the May 2013 speech, the World Socialist Web Site noted
the contradictory character of Obama’s remarks. On the
one hand, he admitted the reactionary and
anti-democratic implications of the “war on terror,” in
which the US government had waged illegal wars, tortured
and murdered prisoners, and spied on the American
people. On the other hand, Obama asserted, as chief
executive, his own authority to continue the spying, to
wage drone-missile warfare, and even to assassinate
American citizens, without any legal or judicial
restraint.
Obama’s speech
at MacDill Air Force Base had something of the same
character. He outlined at some length the supposed
efforts of his administration to wage war without
atrocities, interrogate prisoners without torture, and
protect the American people from terrorism without
resorting to mass surveillance.
In reality, the
Obama administration has carried out the most sweeping
attacks on democratic rights in the name of the struggle
against terrorism: authorizing blanket capture of all
telecommunications and Internet traffic; keeping open
the Guantanamo Bay detention camp; shielding the Bush
administration officials who oversaw CIA torture;
persecuting whistle-blowers who exposed US government
crimes such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and
Chelsea Manning; and carrying out a systematic program
of drone-missile assassinations worldwide, on an
unparalleled scale.
But Obama’s
speech amounted to an admission that the policies he has
pursued have paved the way for an even more right-wing
and undemocratic policy once Trump enters the White
House. Obama is aware that the incoming government will
be one of immense repression and violence, and he
cautions Trump against excesses.
At the same
time, he and the Democratic Party are doing everything
possible to smooth the way for Trump, declaring him the
legitimate president-elect despite losing the popular
vote by more than 2.6 million.
Underlying
Obama’s warnings are not only concerns that he might at
some point face his own Nuremberg trial, but, more
basically, a wariness over the far-reaching and
potentially explosive implications of the overt trashing
of constitutionally guaranteed rights. Historically, the
United States is based on the US Constitution. Once that
tie is severed, there is little to hold the country
together.
Beyond his
advice to Trump, Obama appeared to be appealing more to
the military itself, which exercises an overbearing and
dominant influence over the entire state, including his
own administration and the incoming Trump-led
government. The choice of the venue was significant.
Rather than addressing the American people about the
perilous state of American democracy, he spoke before
the headquarters of US Special Operations Command,
concluding with an appeal that “our men and women in
uniform and the citizens who support you… carry forward
what is best in us.”
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
