From Dreams to Drones: Who is the Real Barack Obama?

[sad sally]

by Pankaj Mishra

Barack Obama, according to Foreign Policy magazine, "has become George W Bush on steroids." Armed with a "kill list," the Nobel peace laureate now hosts "Tuesday terror" meetings at the White House to discuss targets of drone attacks in Pakistan and at least five other countries. The latest of these killed 17 people near the border with Afghanistan today.

Unlike the slacker Bush, who famously disdained specifics, Obama routinely deploys his Ivy League training in law. Many among the dozens of "suspected militants" massacred by drones in the last three days in northwestern Pakistan are likely to be innocent. Reports gathered by NGOs and Pakistani media about previous attacks speak of a collateral damage running into hundreds, and deepening anger and hostility to the United States. No matter: in Obama's legally watertight bureaucracy, drone attacks are not publicly acknowledged; or if they have to be, civilian deaths are flatly denied and all the adult dead categorized as "combatants."

Obama himself signed off on one execution knowing it would also kill innocent family members. He has also made it "legal" to execute Americans without trial and expanded their secret surveillance, preserved the CIA's renditions program, violated his promise to close down Guantánamo Bay, and ruthlessly arraigned whistleblowers.

Not only is Cornel West, Obama's most prominent black intellectual supporter, appalled, but also the apparatchiks of Bush's imperial presidency such as former CIA director Michael Hayden. Perhaps it is time to ask again: who is Barack Obama? And how has Pakistan featured in his worldview? The first question now seems to have been settled too quickly, largely because of the literary power of Obama's speeches and writings. His memoir, Dreams From My Father, was quickened by the drama of the self-invented man from nowhere – the passionate striving, eloquent self-doubt and ambivalence that western literature, from Stendhal to Naipaul, has trained us to identify with a refined intellect and soul. Not surprisingly, Obama's careful self-presentation seduced some prominent literary fictionists, inviting comparisons to James Baldwin.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/04-13

[Life Long Dem]

1. Obama doesn't play games.

That's a strong leader IMO.

[sad sally]

2. Remember history: When Pesident Nixon began his illegal bombing campaign in the sovereign

nations of Cambodia and Laos, these illegal policies were almost included in the articles of impeachment against Nixon. Whether we "like" them or not, Pakistan and Yemen are sovereign nations we are not at war with, yet the armed drone attacks continue. The legal grounds can move like quicksand.

[Wilms]

3. But a "strong" leader of that sort might not be the best one.

From the posted article:

But of course "force," as James Baldwin pointed out during Kissinger and Nixon's last desperate assault on Indochina, "does not reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary and this revelation invests the victim with patience."