This author is saying precisely what I was thinking as I listened to Obama
the other night.
Miriam
Boardman writes: "Barack Obama may not be as obviously fatuous as his
predecessor, but he's no less feckless and irrelevant to anything like the
common good at home and abroad."
President Obama with George W. Bush. (photo: AP)
Obama, Like Bush, Just Makes It All Worse
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
09 December 15
President Obamas oval office talk on terrorism promises more of the same
failed strategy based on no serious reconsideration of changed reality. From
the top, by focusing on 14 Americans killed in San Bernardino, the President
plays into the terrorists hands. President Obama, like the rest of the US
establishment, appears to have learned nothing since President Bush played
the fear card after 9/11, then used it to terrorize the Muslim world with
ever more disastrous results (carried on by President Obama).
Its not as though the madness of the fear-based reaction wasnt obvious
from the get-go. Susan Sontag wrote soberly in The New Yorker in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11 about how to respond rationally to the attack.
For her trouble, she was pilloried by her peers, at The New Yorker and
elsewhere: it was as if the herd had decided that she had no right not to be
afraid, which was the same as saying she had no right not to react as the
terrorists wanted, which is irrational to the point of self-destructive
insanity. But it was what the herd wanted, and did, and still does. Now
weve had 14 years of spiraling destruction at home and abroad, and the
President as our terrorist-in-chief says lets have more.
The Presidents emotional appeal, based on the 14 dead in San Bernardino, is
as maudlin and manipulative as it is irrelevant to terrorism. That may sound
cold, but its true. And its not nearly as cold as using victims as cover
for continuing a murderous failed policy that is most effective in
perpetuating the cycle of violence.
Even if the worst-case scenario is true (and thats far from clear yet),
that Mr. and Mrs. Farook acted on behalf of ISIS or its ilk, what they did
was no more a threat to national security than so many other mass shootings
like Columbine or Sandy Hook or the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Charleston. They are all horrible events. Each of them might have
been prevented if the right people had been alert to their surroundings at
the right time, but none of them, or even all of them, do not threaten
national security in anything like a military invasion and conquest sense.
The actually serious threat is emotional and psychological. Fear, doubt,
uncertainty, confusion, and secrecy all conspire to defeat confidence, calm,
proportionality, and reason. Leadership and populace alike embrace a
zeitgeist of agitation and over-simplification, lashing out in
one-dimensional military responses to misperceived threats that are not even
fundamentally military. Even though most American violence is unrelated to
terrorists, the occasional, real terrorist act leverages the larger national
distress disproportionately. The relentless, unprincipled, bigoted
opposition to the current President has left the country with no coherent
center, no rational government, no possibility of acting sensibly in a
shared national interest, because there no longer is any shared national
interest. This hollowed-out shell of a superpower is an easy target,
promising mindless panic in the face of phantom dangers, and internecine,
impotent quarreling over our real pathologies.
Better responses to terror include courage, defiance, calm reason
Among such lethal events, the Charleston church shooting is the most clearly
obvious attempt at terrorism, good old American terrorism, deeply rooted in
our continuing racist history. The shooter in Charleston intended to ignite
a race war, he said, which seemed a credible notion in the context of the
endless American socio-economic, often violent guerrilla war against
African-Americans or people who sort of look like them. What makes the
Charleston church shooting different from other shootings, perhaps uniquely
different, is that this church chose not to be afraid, this church chose not
to lock its doors, this church chose to reassert its basic values in
response to murderous intimidation.
Not so this country, not so the home of the (once) brave, not so the most
powerful nation in the world quivering in its collective boots and reacting
in a way well-designed to keep the source of that quivering coming.
So when President Obama links San Bernardino, the broader threat of
terrorism, and how we can keep our country safe, he perpetuates a
dishonest paradigm that has served the country disastrously through two
presidential administrations, without significant dissent, official or
popular. It is almost incredible that the country should be in thrall to its
illusions for so long, in the face of so much evidence that were
delusional, but thats the way it is, and theres no serious challenge to
the terrorist-threat fantasy from any of the candidates seeking to replace
Obama.
None of them comes close to the sophisticated analysis of French journalist
Nicolas Henin, who was an ISIS hostage for ten months until his government
negotiated his freedom. Referring to the initial reaction of Europe to
Syrian refugees, Henin observed that that was a huge blow to ISIS, the
Islamic State not only to have hundreds of thousands of Muslims fleeing
their embrace, but fleeing to the infidel nations, who welcomed them with
open arms (at first):
And that was so much a blow that I believe that one of the reasons behind
the Paris attack was to disrupt this and to stop, to make us close our doors
to the refugees, because, actually, welcoming refugees is not a terror
threat to us, to our countries. Its like a vaccine to protect us from
terrorism, because the more interactions we have between societies, between
communities, the less there will be tensions. I mean, the Islamic State
believes in a global confrontation. What they want eventually is civil war
in our countries, or at least large unrest, and in the Middle East, a
large-scale war. This is what they look for. This is what they struggle for.
So we have to kill their narrative and actually to welcome refugees, totally
destroy their narrative. And if you kill their narrative, its even more
efficient than if you drop some bombs and kill some of their fighters.
Smart, humane, and effective counter-terrorism, such as welcoming refugees,
is no longer an easy political option. Not being easy, political leaders are
variously exploiting it with fearmongering or fleeing from it out of sheer
terror and cowardice.
The dont do stupid things President does stupid things
President Obama would have us all be afraid of the Islamic state because, he
says, its a group that threatens us all. This is simply not true. ISIS
certainly doesnt threaten him, or those around him, or most of the military
or intelligence forces, or much of anyone else. The truth is that, although
ISIS could be a threat to any of us, under rare circumstances, it is not yet
remotely close to being a threat to us all. The odds are that it will never
have that capacity. For the President to say so is fearmongering and part of
the con job that supports the imperial state.
Heres exactly how the President three-card-monted the terror con:
So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist
organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here
at home. But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of
radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for
war against America and the West. They had stockpiled assault weapons,
ammunition, and pipe bombs. So this was an act of terrorism, designed to
kill innocent people.
So far, we have no evidence
is a lovely way of suggesting that evidence
doesnt really matter and you just need to believe whatever the President
says because he says it. And what hes saying, nonsensically, is that even
if these people were not terrorists, they nevertheless committed an act of
terrorism. But terrorism is, by definition, a political act. Sometimes mass
murder is terrorism, too, but other times its just mass murder. They need
to be distinguished, and analyzed accordingly and acted on honestly and
rationally.
Terrorism works when the target reacts out of terror
For the terrorist, terrorism is a tactic of weakness. Unable to defeat an
enemy with superior force, the terrorist attacks in ways that are meant to
bait the enemy into reacting both self-destructively and to the benefit of
the terrorists. The US has been reacting self-destructively since 2001,
destroying its own political freedoms out of exaggerated fear (call it
terror). And the US, by fighting terrorists with terrorist tactics (death
squads, drone assassinations, bombing civilians, etc.), has contributed to
expanding the ranks of the terrorists responding to our terrorism. It
doesnt get more mindless than that, if you want to preserve the
exceptional America we are all taught to idealize. And why are our own
terrorist tactics less effective in inciting terror than terrorist attacks
against us?
What if 14 years of madness is not so mad after all? What if the aims of the
terrorists and the covert aims of Western governments are more synchronous
than not? What if the emerging police state here and in France and elsewhere
is just what our rulers want? Promoting popular fear of terrorism just makes
the police state easier to justify, and some of its deluded victims are even
grateful for it.
With that possibility in mind, President Obamas lengthy repetition of the
Bushian view that our nation has been at war (never mind legalities or
constitutionalities here) and needs to continue to be at war, endlessly
even though were not actually at war, were just killing people where and
when we feel like it all makes a detached observer wonder what we think
were actually accomplishing. We get no rationale. All we get, as our
President put it December 6, is a grim re-statement of 2001 tunnel vision
followed by a chilling pause:
our military will continue to hunt down terrorist plotters in any country
where it is necessary.
So much for international law. So much for probable cause. You dont have to
be a terrorist, just a plotter. And who decides whats necessary? For
starters, you know who doesnt get to decide. You also know who doesnt
explain any of those decisions. And ANY country? Russia? China? Iran?
Saudi Arabia? Canada? Probably not, but watch out Venezuela, you may be next
on the hit list once theres nothing left of Yemen. But why? Why does the US
need or even want endless war? And why wage this endless war against proxy
enemies who pose no serious threat anywhere beyond random acts of terror
killing?
Anti-terrorism, as practiced by the US, is an oxymoron
Trying to persuade his listeners of the reality of a new phase of the
terrorist threat, the President cobbles together events many years and
thousands of miles apart (Fort Hood, Chattanooga, San Bernardino, Boston
Marathon) to try to create the impression of some sort of pattern where
there is none not geographically, not ideologically, not even ethnically.
According to the President, with no evidence, Many Americans are asking
whether we are confronted by a cancer that has no immediate cure. Cancer is
the image you choose when you want to scare people. Theres no evidence that
ISIS is a cancer in the US, or anywhere else outside the Tigris-Euphrates
Valley. For Americans, ISIS like al Qaeda is more like acne: unpleasant,
curable, usually temporarily inconvenient, and sometimes but rarely lethal.
That reality helps explain why the President proposes to go on treating the
condition much the same way the US has been treating it for years. He lists
the methods, apparently in prioritized order, with no intended irony: bombs,
troops, working with allies, and talks. This is our strategy to destroy
ISIL [ISIS], the President told us, designed and supported by our military
commanders and counterterrorism experts, as if their past successes could
go without mentioning.
Then the President shifted to a grab-bag of unrelated proposals, including
profiling, as well as a Congressional vote to authorize the war the
President is already fighting. He currently wages war in unnumbered nations
based on the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) passed in the wake
of 9/11. President Bush was the first to abuse that authorization, which was
of dubious constitutionality from the beginning. There has been nothing to
prevent President Obama from proposing a new authorization at any time since
2009, and hes not proposing one now, hes playing deflective politics by
asking Congress to act when he knows it wont as long as Republicans are in
control.
President Obamas speech was not without other ugly little jokes besides his
call for the authority to wage the war hes waging:
Were working with Turkey, he said, without explaining why Turkey
maintained supply lines for ISIS, or why it bombs the Kurds that the US is
helping to fight ISIS, or why Turkey shot down a Russian plane, or why
Turkey is tilting toward becoming an Islamic state itself. Thats funny!
The vast majority of terrorist victims around the world are
Muslim, he observed accurately, without taking the US share of
responsibility for killing Muslim civilians with our own terrorist actions
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, as well as the near-genocide we support in
Yemen. Thats clever.
It is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out
misguided ideas, he said, without implying that well bomb them till they
do, or suggesting that they follow the rather effective US suppression of
misguided ideas. Isnt it ironic?
We are on the right side of history, he said, probably not punning
(although the pun may turn out to be correct), but exercising the cliché
rooted in the absurdity that history has a right side except when its
just propaganda. Are you laughing yet?
This President may not be as obviously fatuous as his predecessor (the
strutting Im a war president! popinjay), but hes no less feckless and
irrelevant to anything like the common good at home and abroad. No wonder
both presidents typically close their acts with the same dark comic line,
May God bless the United States of America. Who else would?
________________________________________
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
President Obama with George W. Bush. (photo: AP)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
Obama, Like Bush, Just Makes It All Worse
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
09 December 15
resident Obamas oval office talk on terrorism promises more of the same
failed strategy based on no serious reconsideration of changed reality. From
the top, by focusing on 14 Americans killed in San Bernardino, the President
plays into the terrorists hands. President Obama, like the rest of the US
establishment, appears to have learned nothing since President Bush played
the fear card after 9/11, then used it to terrorize the Muslim world with
ever more disastrous results (carried on by President Obama).
Its not as though the madness of the fear-based reaction wasnt obvious
from the get-go. Susan Sontag wrote soberly in The New Yorker in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11 about how to respond rationally to the attack.
For her trouble, she was pilloried by her peers, at The New Yorker and
elsewhere: it was as if the herd had decided that she had no right not to be
afraid, which was the same as saying she had no right not to react as the
terrorists wanted, which is irrational to the point of self-destructive
insanity. But it was what the herd wanted, and did, and still does. Now
weve had 14 years of spiraling destruction at home and abroad, and the
President as our terrorist-in-chief says lets have more.
The Presidents emotional appeal, based on the 14 dead in San Bernardino, is
as maudlin and manipulative as it is irrelevant to terrorism. That may sound
cold, but its true. And its not nearly as cold as using victims as cover
for continuing a murderous failed policy that is most effective in
perpetuating the cycle of violence.
Even if the worst-case scenario is true (and thats far from clear yet),
that Mr. and Mrs. Farook acted on behalf of ISIS or its ilk, what they did
was no more a threat to national security than so many other mass shootings
like Columbine or Sandy Hook or the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Charleston. They are all horrible events. Each of them might have
been prevented if the right people had been alert to their surroundings at
the right time, but none of them, or even all of them, do not threaten
national security in anything like a military invasion and conquest sense.
The actually serious threat is emotional and psychological. Fear, doubt,
uncertainty, confusion, and secrecy all conspire to defeat confidence, calm,
proportionality, and reason. Leadership and populace alike embrace a
zeitgeist of agitation and over-simplification, lashing out in
one-dimensional military responses to misperceived threats that are not even
fundamentally military. Even though most American violence is unrelated to
terrorists, the occasional, real terrorist act leverages the larger national
distress disproportionately. The relentless, unprincipled, bigoted
opposition to the current President has left the country with no coherent
center, no rational government, no possibility of acting sensibly in a
shared national interest, because there no longer is any shared national
interest. This hollowed-out shell of a superpower is an easy target,
promising mindless panic in the face of phantom dangers, and internecine,
impotent quarreling over our real pathologies.
Better responses to terror include courage, defiance, calm reason
Among such lethal events, the Charleston church shooting is the most clearly
obvious attempt at terrorism, good old American terrorism, deeply rooted in
our continuing racist history. The shooter in Charleston intended to ignite
a race war, he said, which seemed a credible notion in the context of the
endless American socio-economic, often violent guerrilla war against
African-Americans or people who sort of look like them. What makes the
Charleston church shooting different from other shootings, perhaps uniquely
different, is that this church chose not to be afraid, this church chose not
to lock its doors, this church chose to reassert its basic values in
response to murderous intimidation.
Not so this country, not so the home of the (once) brave, not so the most
powerful nation in the world quivering in its collective boots and reacting
in a way well-designed to keep the source of that quivering coming.
So when President Obama links San Bernardino, the broader threat of
terrorism, and how we can keep our country safe, he perpetuates a
dishonest paradigm that has served the country disastrously through two
presidential administrations, without significant dissent, official or
popular. It is almost incredible that the country should be in thrall to its
illusions for so long, in the face of so much evidence that were
delusional, but thats the way it is, and theres no serious challenge to
the terrorist-threat fantasy from any of the candidates seeking to replace
Obama.
None of them comes close to the sophisticated analysis of French journalist
Nicolas Henin, who was an ISIS hostage for ten months until his government
negotiated his freedom. Referring to the initial reaction of Europe to
Syrian refugees, Henin observed that that was a huge blow to ISIS, the
Islamic State not only to have hundreds of thousands of Muslims fleeing
their embrace, but fleeing to the infidel nations, who welcomed them with
open arms (at first):
And that was so much a blow that I believe that one of the reasons behind
the Paris attack was to disrupt this and to stop, to make us close our doors
to the refugees, because, actually, welcoming refugees is not a terror
threat to us, to our countries. Its like a vaccine to protect us from
terrorism, because the more interactions we have between societies, between
communities, the less there will be tensions. I mean, the Islamic State
believes in a global confrontation. What they want eventually is civil war
in our countries, or at least large unrest, and in the Middle East, a
large-scale war. This is what they look for. This is what they struggle for.
So we have to kill their narrative and actually to welcome refugees, totally
destroy their narrative. And if you kill their narrative, its even more
efficient than if you drop some bombs and kill some of their fighters.
Smart, humane, and effective counter-terrorism, such as welcoming refugees,
is no longer an easy political option. Not being easy, political leaders are
variously exploiting it with fearmongering or fleeing from it out of sheer
terror and cowardice.
The dont do stupid things President does stupid things
President Obama would have us all be afraid of the Islamic state because, he
says, its a group that threatens us all. This is simply not true. ISIS
certainly doesnt threaten him, or those around him, or most of the military
or intelligence forces, or much of anyone else. The truth is that, although
ISIS could be a threat to any of us, under rare circumstances, it is not yet
remotely close to being a threat to us all. The odds are that it will never
have that capacity. For the President to say so is fearmongering and part of
the con job that supports the imperial state.
Heres exactly how the President three-card-monted the terror con:
So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist
organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here
at home. But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of
radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for
war against America and the West. They had stockpiled assault weapons,
ammunition, and pipe bombs. So this was an act of terrorism, designed to
kill innocent people.
So far, we have no evidence
is a lovely way of suggesting that evidence
doesnt really matter and you just need to believe whatever the President
says because he says it. And what hes saying, nonsensically, is that even
if these people were not terrorists, they nevertheless committed an act of
terrorism. But terrorism is, by definition, a political act. Sometimes mass
murder is terrorism, too, but other times its just mass murder. They need
to be distinguished, and analyzed accordingly and acted on honestly and
rationally.
Terrorism works when the target reacts out of terror
For the terrorist, terrorism is a tactic of weakness. Unable to defeat an
enemy with superior force, the terrorist attacks in ways that are meant to
bait the enemy into reacting both self-destructively and to the benefit of
the terrorists. The US has been reacting self-destructively since 2001,
destroying its own political freedoms out of exaggerated fear (call it
terror). And the US, by fighting terrorists with terrorist tactics (death
squads, drone assassinations, bombing civilians, etc.), has contributed to
expanding the ranks of the terrorists responding to our terrorism. It
doesnt get more mindless than that, if you want to preserve the
exceptional America we are all taught to idealize. And why are our own
terrorist tactics less effective in inciting terror than terrorist attacks
against us?
What if 14 years of madness is not so mad after all? What if the aims of the
terrorists and the covert aims of Western governments are more synchronous
than not? What if the emerging police state here and in France and elsewhere
is just what our rulers want? Promoting popular fear of terrorism just makes
the police state easier to justify, and some of its deluded victims are even
grateful for it.
With that possibility in mind, President Obamas lengthy repetition of the
Bushian view that our nation has been at war (never mind legalities or
constitutionalities here) and needs to continue to be at war, endlessly
even though were not actually at war, were just killing people where and
when we feel like it all makes a detached observer wonder what we think
were actually accomplishing. We get no rationale. All we get, as our
President put it December 6, is a grim re-statement of 2001 tunnel vision
followed by a chilling pause:
our military will continue to hunt down terrorist plotters in any country
where it is necessary.
So much for international law. So much for probable cause. You dont have to
be a terrorist, just a plotter. And who decides whats necessary? For
starters, you know who doesnt get to decide. You also know who doesnt
explain any of those decisions. And ANY country? Russia? China? Iran?
Saudi Arabia? Canada? Probably not, but watch out Venezuela, you may be next
on the hit list once theres nothing left of Yemen. But why? Why does the US
need or even want endless war? And why wage this endless war against proxy
enemies who pose no serious threat anywhere beyond random acts of terror
killing?
Anti-terrorism, as practiced by the US, is an oxymoron
Trying to persuade his listeners of the reality of a new phase of the
terrorist threat, the President cobbles together events many years and
thousands of miles apart (Fort Hood, Chattanooga, San Bernardino, Boston
Marathon) to try to create the impression of some sort of pattern where
there is none not geographically, not ideologically, not even ethnically.
According to the President, with no evidence, Many Americans are asking
whether we are confronted by a cancer that has no immediate cure. Cancer is
the image you choose when you want to scare people. Theres no evidence that
ISIS is a cancer in the US, or anywhere else outside the Tigris-Euphrates
Valley. For Americans, ISIS like al Qaeda is more like acne: unpleasant,
curable, usually temporarily inconvenient, and sometimes but rarely lethal.
That reality helps explain why the President proposes to go on treating the
condition much the same way the US has been treating it for years. He lists
the methods, apparently in prioritized order, with no intended irony: bombs,
troops, working with allies, and talks. This is our strategy to destroy
ISIL [ISIS], the President told us, designed and supported by our military
commanders and counterterrorism experts, as if their past successes could
go without mentioning.
Then the President shifted to a grab-bag of unrelated proposals, including
profiling, as well as a Congressional vote to authorize the war the
President is already fighting. He currently wages war in unnumbered nations
based on the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) passed in the wake
of 9/11. President Bush was the first to abuse that authorization, which was
of dubious constitutionality from the beginning. There has been nothing to
prevent President Obama from proposing a new authorization at any time since
2009, and hes not proposing one now, hes playing deflective politics by
asking Congress to act when he knows it wont as long as Republicans are in
control.
President Obamas speech was not without other ugly little jokes besides his
call for the authority to wage the war hes waging:
Were working with Turkey, he said, without explaining why Turkey
maintained supply lines for ISIS, or why it bombs the Kurds that the US is
helping to fight ISIS, or why Turkey shot down a Russian plane, or why
Turkey is tilting toward becoming an Islamic state itself. Thats funny!
The vast majority of terrorist victims around the world are
Muslim, he observed accurately, without taking the US share of
responsibility for killing Muslim civilians with our own terrorist actions
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, as well as the near-genocide we support in
Yemen. Thats clever.
It is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out
misguided ideas, he said, without implying that well bomb them till they
do, or suggesting that they follow the rather effective US suppression of
misguided ideas. Isnt it ironic?
We are on the right side of history, he said, probably not punning
(although the pun may turn out to be correct), but exercising the cliché
rooted in the absurdity that history has a right side except when its
just propaganda. Are you laughing yet?
This President may not be as obviously fatuous as his predecessor (the
strutting Im a war president! popinjay), but hes no less feckless and
irrelevant to anything like the common good at home and abroad. No wonder
both presidents typically close their acts with the same dark comic line,
May God bless the United States of America. Who else would?
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
