Ending Bush's war, has Obama embraced his war doctrine?

In October 2002, about the time when the George W Bush administration was building an international case for a war on Iraq, ostensibly to defang it of its “weapons of mass destruction”, a little-known US senator with a funny name made an impassioned speech in Chicago criticising the needless warmongering. In many ways it was a courageous speech that went against the tide of popular opinion in America, which –still in shock a year after the 9/11 terror attacks – was swayed by the neo-conservative case for pre-emptive strikes on any foreign power that might, even remotely, possess the capacity to strike at the US in the way that the Al Qaeda had spectacularly done. [caption id=“attachment_158421” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“US President Barack Obama. Reuters”]  [/caption] Not everyone was persuaded by the neo-con narrative, of course. A strong liberal, anti-war constituency challenged the administration’s case and questioned the flimsy evidence on which it had been built. But among play-safe politicians, even on the Democratic side, there weren’t too many who would stick their necks out for what was, in the main, an unpopular cause. One of the exceptions was Barack Obama, then a little-known Senator from Illionis. Consistent in his opposition to the Iraq war, he addressed what was billed as an anti-war rally and stirred it with his oratorical gift that was to inspire the world years later during his 2008 presidential campaign. In that speech, which you can read in its entirety here, Obama made clear that he wasn’t opposed to war in all circumstances, and that on occasion, wars may even be necessary. But the war against Iraq that the Bush administration was preparing for was, Obama said, “a dumb war, a rash war” which he opposed. Although he nursed no illusions about Saddam Hussein, and acknowledged that he was a “brutal man”, Obama said Saddam posed no imminent and direct threat to the US. That didn’t stop the Bush administration from blundering into a ruinous, and wholly unnecessary, war in 2003. That decision decisively bent the arc of history in a way that enfeebled America economically and overstretched it militarily – and, ironically, contributed to Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency in 2008. Much water has flowed down the Tigris since Bush’s fateful decision of 2003. But yesterday, President Obama – in one of those curious twists of history – effectively ended the war on Iraq, which he had opposed as a senator all those years ago. In style and substance, Obama’s drawing down of US troops and signalling of the end of the war was markedly different from the premature “victory” that Bush proclaimed in 2003, when he stood on the decks of an US aircraft carrier, in front of a sign that read ‘Mission Accomplished’. ( Years later, Bush said the sign was intended to cheer up the troops, and not to signal that he thought the Iraq war was over, but by then history had already judged the Bush presidency harshly, and with good reason.) In contrast, the real end of the war, which Obama proclaimed yesterday, was accompanied by little or no fanfare, and a greater sense of sobriety as befits the losses – in terms of human lives and money – that the US suffered over eight years. And the utter futility of the war itself. As we’ve noted earlier , the decade gone by was effectively a “lost decade” for America, distracted as it as with war in faraway lands while its economy reeled under successive recessions and volatile boom-bust cycles that would implode spectacularly in 2008. It was also a period when income disparity in the US worsened, which even three years of the Obama presidency haven’t managed to heal, setting the stage for the Occupy movement that has overrun US cities. Much of Obama’s perceived failure owes to Republican leaders’ cussedness in thwarting every one of Obama’s initiatives to fix the economy, even dragging the US to the brink of default. But even liberal opinion in the US has been disappointed with Obama for not being combative enough in beating back Republican obstructionism. More disquietingly, however, liberal opinion is beginning to fret that the distinction between Obama’s policies in the “war on terror” and the worst of the Bush-era policies is beginning to blur. Indicatively, civil libertarian groups are reeling in shock after the White House indicated earlier this week that it would support passage of the “indefinite detention” legislation that, critics say, could authorise the US military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world. Human Rights Watch said that Obama’s decision “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad” and that “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” Even in its dealings with Iran, the Obama administration’s rhetoric and incremental slide into confrontation has observers wondering about whether, as Republican war hawks crow, Obama has bought into the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes. Quite uncharacteristically, Obama recently expanded US military troop presence in Australia evidently as part of an effort to checkmate China, Perhaps Obama, who ended the war on Iraq soberly yesterday, has, for all his measured approach to geopolitics, forgotten the pacifist message of his stirring speech from 2002…