Posted by
Bill Crawford on Thursday, May 21, 2009 9:34:52 PM
We had the dueling banjo thing going today- Obama and Cheney talking simultaneously. For those of you who think this was a Cheney machination, Dick's speech had been scheduled for a while. Obama chose to talk at the same time, for whatever reason he thought was necessary.
Obama laid out what he thought was a fair and meticulous path to his version of national security. Typically, he painted his picture of fairness and accuracy by omitting what was inconvenient.
For starters, he justified the release of the CIA interrogation method and their attendant security issues by announcing that he had "banned" any future use of any such methods. But if you read his Guantanamo memo, it allows the intelligence community and the White House to re-carve any exceptions it wants, if the circumstances are dire enough. In other words, as with McCain's condemnation of this stuff last year, Obama realizes that handcuffing himself may turn into a homeland nightmare. But for the sake of moralizing, he leaves this out.
He also continues to paint a picture of the world that equates world cooperation with us in this war on our moral posture. He is as wrong as he can be on this. The world cooperates with us (or doesn't) because of fear. Many countries cooperated wiith the Soviets rather than us during the Cold War because they feared the Soviets more than the Americans. The Europeans don't cooperate with us in the War on Terror because their biggest fear is the large Muslim populations among them in their own countries. All of our efforts to clean up Guantanamo will not change this.
And whatever Muslim extremists we manage to capture and neutralize will not begin to cooperate with us if we stick to the Army Field Manual, because they know they will have nothing to fear from their interrogators..
Dick Cheney understood this, and so did Bush. The only difference between the two is that Bush seems to be comfortable in letting history be his judge, and Cheney is more perturbed ay letting Obama rewrite the history of the last eight years without spekaing up himself.
There is the rub. Obama is not content changing course, which, as a duly elected President, he has an absolute right to attempt. He insists on showing, by comparison, that his road is the only high road around and all those who disagree are some sort of moral reprobates.
If you dissect Cheney's words, he allows for diagreement. You may not agree with what we did, he says, but here is why we did it. He also points out how they got approval for everything they did, and he dares anybody to challenge them legally. Which, curiously, many on the Left have threatened but none have tried to actually do.
Which is why mpeachment was bandied about at so many cocktal parties in the Beltway, but nobody ever signed on to co-sponsor John Conyer's H.R. 635, 636 and 637, which sat in Committee and died. If the Bush administration actually dd what they were accused of, this libertarian would have gone along with them in impeachment in a heartbeat.
My advice for Obama: stop running for President, and act like one. You don't need to continue makinjg comparisons to the past administration to be Presidential. You got 55% of the vote, big guy. Run with it.