Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

24. “Obama Is Set to Continue the Course Set by Bush”

UNITED STATES, 2002–2008—Barack Obama is an Ivy League–educated constitutional law professor whose political career was carefully plotted. In October 2002, when he was a state senator in Illinois, Obama had staked out a position on the Iraq War that foreshadowed the foreign policy vision he would later articulate as a presidential candidate. “I don’t oppose all wars,” Obama declared. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by…armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” Obama would often refer to that speech, but very few Americans heard it at the time. Obama burst onto the scene in 2004 when he delivered a widely praised, fiery keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, won a seat in the US Senate that year and then, three years later, announced his candidacy for president. “Let’s be the generation that never forgets what happened on that September day and confront the terrorists with everything we’ve got,” Obama said in his speech announcing his presidential run. “We can work together to track terrorists down with a stronger military, we can tighten the net around their finances, and we can improve our intelligence capabilities.”

In crafting his campaign strategy on foreign policy, Obama and his advisers needed to straddle a fence between criticizing the national security policies of the Bush era while also appearing tough on terrorism. Obama conducted a dual-track approach in attacking his Republican opponent, John McCain: linking McCain to the war in Iraq and the unaccountability and secrecy of the Bush era, and simultaneously pledging to wage a “smarter,” more focused war against al Qaeda.

On the morning of October 4, 2007, the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page story detailing a 2005 Justice Department opinion granting “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” Under newly arrived attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the CIA was “for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” That morning Obama appeared on national television. “This is an example of what we’ve lost over the last six years and what we have to recapture,” Obama told MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski. “You know, all of us believe we’ve got to track down and capture or kill terrorists who threaten America, but we have to understand that torture is not going to either provide us with information, and it’s also going to create more enemies. And so as a strategy for creating a safer and secure America, I think it is wrongheaded, as well as immoral.” Obama added: “I think this administration basically viewed any tactic as acceptable, as long as it could spin it and keep it out of the public eye.”

As the presidential campaign rolled on, promises to reverse Bush-era policies became central to Obama’s agenda. Torture, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, wars without justification or accountability and the evisceration of US civil liberties would come to an end, Obama vowed. “We have been governed by fear for the last six years, and this president has used the fear of terrorism to launch a war that should have never been authorized,” Obama said in late October 2007. He argued that the political climate fostered by the Bush administration undermined the United States at home and abroad. “We haven’t even talked about civil liberties and the impact of that politics of fear, what that has done to us in terms of undermining basic civil liberties in this country, what it has done in terms of our reputation around the world,” Obama said.

But even as Obama won great praise and support from liberals and antiwar organizations in the United States, he articulated a foreign policy vision that, when it came to counterterrorism, made clear he intended to authorize covert and clandestine operations. “It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005,” Obama said. “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.” McCain criticized Obama for his position that he would attack inside of Pakistan, calling it irresponsible. “You don’t broadcast and say that you’re going to bomb a country without their permission,” McCain said. Obama shot back that the Bush administration had done “exactly that,” declaring, “That is the position we should have taken in the first place…the fact is, it was the right strategy.”

In accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 in a massive football stadium in Denver, Colorado, Obama telegraphed a policy he intended to implement: escalating the war in Afghanistan and increasing US covert kill/capture operations globally. “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives,” Obama said, reiterating that if he were elected, the United States would act unilaterally in Pakistan or elsewhere to kill terrorists. “We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights.”

Obama’s stump speeches on the campaign trail often focused on ending the war in Iraq, but he also articulated a hawkish position on unilateral US attacks that would necessitate a significant role for JSOC and the CIA. After his inauguration, as Obama built his foreign policy team, he stacked the administration with hawkish Democrats, including his vice president, Joe Biden, and secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, both of whom supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Susan Rice would serve as UN ambassador, and Richard Holbrooke would head up the civilian side of Obama’s plan to expand the US war in Afghanistan. All of these figures had a track record of support for military interventions, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arc that stretched from George H. W. Bush’s time in office to the present. Obama also retained Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates; tapped CIA veteran John Brennan as his senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security; and named General James Jones as his national security adviser.

Conservative Republicans heaped praise on Obama’s picks. President Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove, called Obama’s cabinet selections “reassuring,” and neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot beamed: “I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain.” Boot added that Hillary Clinton would be a “powerful” voice “for ‘neoliberalism’ which is not so different in many respects from ‘neoconservativism.’” Boot’s colleague Michael Goldfarb wrote in the Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he saw “certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term.”

Within weeks of assuming office in early 2009, Obama would send a clear message that he intended to keep intact many of the most aggressive counterterrorism policies of the Bush era. Among these were targeted killings, warrantless wiretapping, the use of secret prisons, a crackdown on habeas corpus rights for prisoners, indefinite detention, CIA rendition flights, drone bombings, the deployment of mercenaries in US wars and reliance on the “State Secrets Privilege.” In some cases, Obama would expand Bush-era programs he had once blasted as hallmarks of an unaccountable executive branch.

Obama paid lip service on the campaign trail to holding Bush-era torturers accountable, but he later backed off such rhetoric, saying after his election that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” He said his job as president “is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”

Early on in Obama’s time in office, Dick Cheney charged that Obama was moving “to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11.” Cheney was wrong. If anything, Obama would guarantee that many of those policies would become entrenched, bipartisan institutions in US national security policy for many years to come. Whether these policies have kept Americans safe—or have made them less safe—is another question.