Peas In A Pod
by digby
Bush henchman Michael Hayden was on Candy Crowley's show today and had (mostly) nice words for President Obama. Crowley pointed out the recent carnage and ill feelings in Pakistan and wondered about the dangers of inadvertently causing a Pakistani uprising.
Crowley: Do you think these drones have been excessive and do you think they're always helpful?
Hayden: As you know I'm not here to confirm or deny any specific activity. But I do know that taking the fight to the enemy, that being able to take the senior leadership off the battlefield, and that began in about July of 2008 in the current effort, has been, I think, the single greatest factor in keeping America and our friends safe. I know all activity that we do to take the enemy off the battlefield is done very carefully and with great precision, high confidence in the intelligence, so I think it is an appropriate course of action. In fact, in good conscience it would be very difficult for any administration to stop doing it.
Crowley: You sound as if though you believe that president Obama is doing a good job on the terrorism front.
Hayden: there are somethings I disagreed with and I disagreed with publicly ...
Crowley: such as?
Hayden: making the CIA interrogation memos public. Stopping the CIA interrogation program and not really replacing it even to this date. But by and large there's been a powerful continuity between the 43rd and 44th president and I think that reflects the reality that both President Obama and President Bush faced in terms of the threat and the tools that are available to them.
So other than the fact that he blew the cover off the torture regime and refused to publicly endorse waterboarding and putting prisoners in coffins with poisonous bugs crawling all over them, he and Bush are two peas in a pod. You'd think the right would be ecstatic.
There's a lesson in this: Democracy generally doesn't apply to warmaking. Until the last weeks of the 2008 campaign, it was dominated by the differences in approach to war and foreign policy between Barack Obama and George W. Bush and many of my friends told me that the main reason the preferred Obama over all the other candidates was his bold stand in that arena.
That was election talk. It's been that way my whole life. Obama and his people figured out early on that they share power with the Military Industrial Complex and they had little desire to use political capital to exercise what they have. What they didn't figure out is that (since 1968, anyway) Democratic presidents get screwed regardless. The MIC knows it has the place locked up --- at this point it's about the spoils, and they get slightly fewer goodies and more petty political hassles under Democrats. (Plus there's the macho Jesus factor.)
I don't know what to do about it. I guess you have to hope that Democrats who run like Obama ran in 08 will want to at least make some changes around the margins that will hold over time. But that's about the best you can hope for as long as America is the world's dominant imperialist power. Until that changes --- and it will, because it's unaffordable --- we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we are voting for people who will do these things differently, regardless of what they say on the stump. There are other differences between candidates and parties that can make a difference -- this isn't one.
Change on this will come from something other than democratic action. Unfortunately, dead eyed robots like Hayden don't make you feel very secure that this change won't be the result of a cataclysmic mistake. After all, we know for a fact that "careful" and "precision" aren't words you can reasonably apply to what's happening at the Pakistan border right now.
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