Category Archives: Barack Obama

Obama’s foreign puzzle, not a real foreign policy

Carne Ross writes: Even before President Obama spoke to the US military academy at West Point on Wednesday, the White House trumpeted his commencement address as offering a unifying vision of US foreign policy – one that is “both interventionist and internationalist, but not isolationist or unilateral“.

With an introduction like that, it came as a welcome surprise that the speech was merely intelligible. I liked the anti-thoughtless-intervention line – “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail” – but much of the nearly hour-long speech was a dull checklist of world problems (and the UN Law of the Sea Convention!), most addressed by the routine oversimplifications required on such occasions.

Obama’s “vision” was peppered with confusing vocabulary about “realists” and “interventionists”, both depicted as straw men, and too many predictable bromides about international cooperation, democracy and “human dignity”. And I say this as a former speechwriter who also used to lean on such filler.

There was no over-arching theme to this rhetoric, save Obama’s recommitment to American exceptionalism (“with every fiber of my being”) and his rejection of mindless invasions. Not much to disagree with there, but not much new either. One couldn’t avoid the impression that this speech marked the end of a war-laden chapter for the US – with little clear idea of what the next chapter should really mean, save the repetitious evocation of “American leadership”.

The leitmotif of Obama’s foreign policy – and the first item of his West Point talk – is withdrawal, as Tuesday’s announcement about drawdown in Afghanistan reconfirmed. So what about the rest of Obama’s foreign policy?

Facts, not rhetoric, paint a picture of this administration’s troubling and often counterproductive inconsistency abroad. There is some good, but there is plenty that’s really bad.

From drones and emissions, to the South China Sea to Somalia to the Crimea and back again, it’s not easy connect the many dots of America’s foreign policies. Because aside from tortured rhetoric, unified they are not. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s deadly vaccination ruse in Pakistan

An editorial in the New York Times says: The use of a sham vaccination program in the government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden has produced a lethal backlash in Pakistan where dozens of public health workers have been murdered and fearful parents are shunning polio vaccine for their children.

Leaders of a dozen American schools of public health raised an alarm with the Obama administration 16 months ago and finally got a response this month when the White House promised that the C.I.A. will no longer use phony immunization programs in its spying operations.

The fakery — one of an assortment of intelligence stratagems before the successful raid that killed bin Laden — should never have been used in a world where hardworking health care agencies depend on the trust of local communities.

The C.I.A.’s ruse involved phony door-to-door solicitations by a physician promising to deliver hepatitis B immunizations; his real purpose was to confirm bin Laden’s suspected hiding place. The ploy helped fuel a militant backlash against immunization workers, and as many as 60 health workers and police officers have since been killed.

Meanwhile, polio is on the rise, with Pakistan accounting for 66 of the 82 cases reported so far this year by the World Health Organization. Last year, there were 93 cases of polio in Pakistan, where the health organization warns that the disease is endemic, as it is in Afghanistan and Nigeria.

The C.I.A. can no longer seek to “obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material” gathered this way, according to a promise from the Obama administration. That is small comfort for those suffering the aftereffects of this ruse.

Convincing wary parents to accept polio vaccination — and finding health workers willing to risk violence — has been made more difficult than ever.

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The year of living more dangerously: Obama’s drone speech was a sham

Andrea J Prasow writes: A lot can happen in a year. And a lot can’t.

Twelve months ago today, Barack Obama gave a landmark national security speech in which he frankly acknowledged that the United States had at least in some cases compromised its values in the years since 9/11 – and offered his vision of a US national security policy more directly in line with “the freedoms and ideals that we defend.” It was widely praised as “a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America“.

Addressing an audience at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, the president pledged greater transparency about targeted killings, rededicated himself to closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and urged Congress to refine and ultimately repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which has been invoked to justify everything from military detention to drones strikes.

A year later, none of these promises have been met. Instead, drone strikes have continue (and likely killed and wounded civilians), 154 men remain detained at Guantanamo and the administration has taken no steps to roll back the AUMF. This is not the sort of change Obama promised. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s revamp of anti-terror policies stalls

The Washington Post reports: A year after President Obama announced a major new counterterrorism strategy to take the country beyond the threats that flowed directly from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, much of the agenda he outlined remains unfinished or not even begun.

In an ambitious address delivered a year ago Friday at the National Defense University, Obama said that the core of al-Qaeda was “on the path to defeat” and that the upcoming end of the war in Afghanistan had brought America to a “crossroads.”

But many of the changes Obama outlined have proved easier said than done, including new rules governing the use of force abroad, increased public information on and congressional oversight of lethal attacks with drones, and efforts to move the CIA out of the killing business.

Some initiatives have become mired in internal debates, while others have taken a back seat to other pressing issues and perceived new terrorism dangers. Congress, while demanding faster change in some areas, has resisted movement in others. [Continue reading…]

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Bush-Obama continuity and the interests of the national security establishment

Glenn Greenwald writes: The just-retired long-time NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, recently traveled to Australia to give a remarkably long and wide-ranging interview with an extremely sycophantic “interviewer” with The Australian Financial Review. The resulting 17,000-word transcript and accompanying article form a model of uncritical stenography journalism, but Alexander clearly chose to do this because he is angry, resentful, and feeling unfairly treated, and the result is a pile of quotes that are worth examining, only a few of which are noted below:

AFR: What were the key differences for you as director of NSA serving under presidents Bush and Obama? Did you have a preferred commander in chief?

Gen. Alexander: Obviously they come from different parties, they view things differently, but when it comes to the security of the nation and making those decisions about how to protect our nation, what we need to do to defend it, they are, ironically, very close to the same point. You would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions about how to defend our nation from terrorists and other threats.

The almost-complete continuity between George W. Bush and Barack Obama on such matters has been explained by far too many senior officials in both parties, and has been amply documented in far too many venues, to make it newsworthy when it happens again. Still, the fact that one of the nation’s most powerful generals in history, who has no incentive to say it unless it were true, just comes right out and states that Bush and The Candidate of Change are “very close to the same point” and “you would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions” is a fine commentary on a number of things, including how adept the 2008 Obama team was at the art of branding. [Continue reading…]

Greenwald says Alexander “has no incentive to say it unless it were true” — but actually he does have an incentive as does every other former and current member of the national security establishment.

Whenever intelligence agencies are accused of lack of accountability, evading Congressional oversight, or any other abuse of power, their comeback is always the same: we are the humble and loyal servants of the president doing exactly what we are asked to do.

So, they very much do have an interest in portraying the continuity of their own operations as perfectly mirroring the continuity in the approaches of their commander in chief.

The irony in the continuity between Bush and Obama has been frequently noted. What seems more worthy of being underlined is the way in which Obama has turned out to be worse than Bush.

The excesses of the last administration have come to be portrayed as a product of 9/11, but the ways in which Obama has institutionalized pervasive secrecy are much more insidious and much less likely to be undone by future presidents.

And if anyone thought that the legacy of the Snowden/Greenwald revelations might be a move towards more open government, the opposite is turning out to look more likely.

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How many have we killed with drones?

David Cole writes: On Monday, The New York Times reported that “the Senate has quietly stripped a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required President Obama to make public each year the number of people killed or injured in targeted killing operations in Pakistan and other countries where the United States uses lethal force.” National security officials in the Obama administration objected strongly to having to notify the public of the results and scope of their dirty work, and the Senate acceded. So much for what President Obama has called “the most transparent administration in history.”

The Senate’s decision is particularly troubling in view of how reticent the administration itself continues to be about the drone program. To date, Obama has publicly admitted to the deaths of only four people in targeted killing operations. That came in May 2013, when, in conjunction with a speech at the National Defense University, and, in his words, “to facilitate transparency and debate on the issue,” President Obama acknowledged for the first time that the United States had killed four Americans in drone strikes. But according to credible accounts, Obama has overseen the killing of several thousand people in drone strikes since taking office. Why only admit to the four Americans’ deaths? Is the issue of targeted killings only appropriate for debate when we kill our own citizens? Don’t all human beings have a right to life?

In the NDU speech, President Obama also announced new limits on the use of drones “beyond the Afghan theater.” He proclaimed that drone strikes would be authorized away from the battlefield only when necessary to respond to “continuing and imminent threats” posed by people who cannot be captured or otherwise countermanded. Most important, he said, “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” Yet in December, a US drone strike in Yemen reportedly struck a wedding party. The New York Times reported that while some of the victims may have been linked to al-Qaeda, the strike killed “at least a half dozen innocent people, according to a number of tribal leaders and witnesses.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. senators remove requirement for disclosure over drone strike victims

The Guardian reports: At the behest of the director of national intelligence, US senators have removed a provision from a major intelligence bill that would require the president to publicly disclose information about drone strikes and their victims.

The bill authorizing intelligence operations in fiscal 2014 passed out of the Senate intelligence committee in November, and it originally required the president to issue an annual public report clarifying the total number of “combatants” and “noncombatant civilians” killed or injured by drone strikes in the previous year. It did not require the White House to disclose the total number of strikes worldwide.

But the Guardian has confirmed that Senate leaders have removed the language as they prepare to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, after the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, assured them in a recent letter that the Obama administration was looking for its own ways to disclose more about its highly controversial drone strikes. [Continue reading…]

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How American drone strikes are devastating Yemen

Whenever President Obama orders summary executions through drone strikes, the easiest way of knowing that the CIA doesn’t actually know who was killed is that the dead all carry the same name: militants.

In the latest wave of attacks, 55 “militants” are said to have been killed.

It would probably be much more accurate to report that approximately 55 people were killed, few if any of their names are known and they are suspected to have been members of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Rather than calling these targeted killings, they should probably be seen as speculative murders — the act of terminating someone’s life when the U.S. government has the suspicion that person might pose an unspecified threat in the future.

McClatchy reports: A series of U.S. government drone strikes in Yemen over recent days has brought into sharp relief divisions among the country’s rulers over how to rein in a program that they’ve long supported.

Only last week, a top Yemeni military official told McClatchy the government had placed the drone program “under review” in hopes of persuading the United States to limit strikes.

The most recent strikes — one Saturday morning in the central province of al Bayda that hit a vehicle carrying more than a dozen suspected militants from al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, another roughly 24 hours later in the reputed AQAP stronghold of al Mahfad in the southern province of Abyan and a third Monday that killed three in Shabwah province — show that such a review has yet to limit the attacks.

Yemen’s government has long assented to the strikes — privately, in the case of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, but openly under the country’s current leader, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who took power in February 2012.

But a rising number of civilian casualties, particularly the December bombing of a wedding party that left 15 dead, has unnerved some Yemeni officials.

“We’ve told the Americans that they’ve been going about things the wrong way,” the high-ranking Yemeni military official said last week, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. “When it comes to the current drone policy, there have been too many mistakes.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: A U.S. national security source said on Monday that the U.S. government believed that AQAP is currently plotting attacks against American targets, including the U.S. embassy on Sanaa.

But analysts say drone strikes do only limited harm to AQAP.

They say the group will remain a serious menace unless the government can address challenges such as poverty and inadequate security forces, and curb the occasional civilian casualties inflicted by drone attacks that inflame anti-U.S. sentiment.

“The U.S. can’t simply kill its way out of the terrorism threat,” said Letta Tayler, Human Rights Watch’s senior researcher on terrorism and counter-terrorism.

“The U.S. and other concerned nations should address all the drivers of terrorism including poverty, illiteracy, political marginalisation and lack of opportunity for young people.”

Vivian Salama writes: The people of Yemen can hear destruction before it arrives. In cities, towns and villages across this country, which hangs off the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, the air buzzes with the sound of American drones flying overhead. The sound is a constant and terrible reminder: a robot plane, acting on secret intelligence, may calculate that the man across from you at the coffee shop, or the acquaintance with whom you’ve shared a passing word on the street, is an Al Qaeda operative. This intelligence may be accurate or it may not, but it doesn’t matter. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaotic buzzing above sharpens into the death-herald of an incoming missile.

Such quite literal existential uncertainty is coming at a deep psychological cost for the Yemeni people. For Americans, this military campaign is an abstraction. The drone strikes don’t require U.S. troops on the ground, and thus are easy to keep out of sight and out of mind. Over half of Yemen’s 24.8 million citizens – militants and civilians alike – are impacted every day. A war is happening, and one of the unforeseen casualties is the Yemeni mind.

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and anxiety are becoming rampant in the different corners of the country where drones are active. “Drones hover over an area for hours, sometimes days and weeks,” said Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American anti-drone activist and cofounder of Support Yemen, a media collective raising awareness about issues afflicting the country. Yemenis widely describe suffering from constant sleeplessness, anxiety, short-tempers, an inability to concentrate and, unsurprisingly, paranoia.

Alwazir recalled a Yemeni villager telling her that the drones “are looking inside our homes and even at our women.'” She says that, “this feeling of infringement of privacy, combined with civilian casualties and constant fear and anxiety has a profound long time psychological effect on those living under drones.” [Continue reading…]

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Jimmy Carter urges Keystone XL rejection

The Associated Press reports: For the first time, a former U.S. president has come out against the Keystone XL pipeline.

The ex-president in question is Jimmy Carter.

The 39th president joined a group of Nobel laureates to sign a letter urging the current commander-in-chief to reject the pipeline from Canada.

The letter tells Barack Obama that he stands on the brink of making a choice that will define his legacy on one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced — climate change.

“History will reflect on this moment and it will be clear to our children and grandchildren if you made the right choice…. We urge you to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline,” the letter reads.

It says his decision will either signal a “dangerous commitment” to the status quo, or “bold leadership” that will inspire millions counting on him to do the right thing for the climate. [Continue reading…]

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The Obama legacy

The New York Times reports: For all the talk about the movement that elected Mr. Obama, the more notable movement of Obama supporters has been away from politics. It appears that few of the young people who voted for him, and even fewer Obama campaign and administration operatives, have decided to run for office. Far more have joined the high-paid consultant ranks.

Unlike John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who inspired virtual legislatures of politicians and became generational touchstones, Mr. Obama has so far had little such influence. That is all the more remarkable considering he came to office tapping into spirit of volunteerism and community service that pollsters say is widespread and intense among young people. Mr. Obama has come to represent that spirit, but he has failed, pollsters say, to transform it into meaningful engagement in the political process.

“If you were to call it an Obama generation, there was a window,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. “That opportunity has been lost.” He said the youth who came of voting age around the time of the 2008 election have since lost interest in electoral politics, and pointed to a survey he conducted last year among 18- to 29-year-olds. Although 70 percent said they considered community service an honorable endeavor, only 35 percent said the same about running for office.

“We’re seeing the younger cohort is even less connected with him generally, with his policies, as well as politics generally,” Mr. Della Volpe added, referring to Mr. Obama. Sergio Bendixen, who worked as a pollster for Mr. Obama, blamed a social media-addled generation accustomed to instant gratification for the drop-off. After getting swept up by the Obama movement of 2008, he said, “They went on to the next website and then the next click on their computer. I just don’t see the generation as all that ideological or invested in causes for the long run.” [Continue reading…]

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NSA pretends it can increase national security while diminishing internet security

The New York Times reports: Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.

But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

The White House has never publicly detailed Mr. Obama’s decision, which he made in January as he began a three-month review of recommendations by a presidential advisory committee on what to do in response to recent disclosures about the National Security Agency.

But elements of the decision became evident on Friday, when the White House denied that it had any prior knowledge of the Heartbleed bug, a newly known hole in Internet security that sent Americans scrambling last week to change their online passwords. The White House statement said that when such flaws are discovered, there is now a “bias” in the government to share that knowledge with computer and software manufacturers so a remedy can be created and distributed to industry and consumers. [Continue reading…]

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Why has President Obama deported more immigrants than any president in U.S. history?

Alejandra Marchevsky and Beth Baker report: On March 13, President Obama ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to review its deportation practices, acknowledging the toll that record-high deportation rates are taking on local communities. A White House statement issued later that day read, “The president emphasized his deep concern about the pain too many families feel from the separation that comes from our broken immigration system.”

The President’s pledge came in response to growing pressure from immigrant rights advocates and progressive Democrats outraged by the Obama administration’s five-year deportation spree. Since taking the oath of office, Obama has deported immigrants at a faster rate than any other president in US history, nearly a record 2 million people. On a typical day, there are over 30,000 immigrants imprisoned in the world’s largest immigration detention system. Most deportees never see an attorney or have a hearing before a judge before they are expelled from the country. Deportation carries a high price for families and communities across America: one-quarter of all deportees are separated from their US citizen children and countless others from spouses and other family members.

Obama’s claim to sympathize with immigrant families’ “pain” obscures a troubling fact: while the review he ordered may lead to more “humane” treatment of some undocumented immigrants — a welcome if still-modest outcome — it will do nothing for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who get snared each year in the nation’s thickening national security and criminal enforcement webs. And these immigrants represent the majority of persons deported during the Obama era.

For the last twenty-five years, and particularly since the start of the “War on Terror,” immigration has become increasingly tangled with criminal enforcement and national security. George W. Bush cemented the relationship in 2003 when he folded the Immigration and Naturalization Service into a mammoth new agency, the Department of Homeland Security, which was charged with overseeing both counterterrorism and immigration enforcement. The message was obvious: immigration was a threat to the country, and thus, immigration authorities had become an arm of the national security apparatus. [Continue reading…]

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Putin calls Obama to discuss Ukraine

n13-iconThe New York Times reports: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia reached out to President Obama on Friday to discuss ideas about how to peacefully resolve the international standoff over Ukraine, a surprise move by Moscow to pull back from the brink of an escalated confrontation that has put Europe and much of the world on edge.

After weeks of provocative moves punctuated by a menacing buildup of troops on Ukraine’s border, Mr. Putin’s unexpected telephone call to Mr. Obama offered a hint of a possible settlement. The two leaders agreed to have their top diplomats meet to discuss concrete proposals for defusing the crisis that has generated the most serious clash between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War.

But it remained uncertain whether Mr. Putin was seriously interested in a resolution that would go far enough to satisfy the United States, Ukraine and Europe, or instead was seeking a diplomatic advantage at a time when he has been isolated internationally. While the White House account of the call emphasized the possible diplomatic movement, the Kremlin’s version stressed Mr. Putin’s complaints about “extremists” in Ukraine and introduced into the mix of issues on the table the fate of Transnistria, another pro-Russian breakaway province outside his borders. [Continue reading…]

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Pierre and Pamela Omidyar’s cozy ties with the White House

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Paul Carr writes: Last month, Pando’s Mark Ames reported that Omidyar Networks, the philanthropic organization operated by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pamela, had co-invested with the US government in opposition groups that played a key role in organizing Ukraine’s recent revolution.

Unsurprisingly, given Omidyar is now running First Look Media, a journalistic enterprise dedicated to exposing US government wrongdoing around the world, some FLM staffers and supporters rushed to cry foul over our report.

USA Today’s Rem Rieder argued that Omidyar Network’s investments were a non-issue as they had been disclosed years earlier. Other supporters pointed out that, just because the Omidyars co-invested with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and appeared to share their policy on regime change in Ukraine, didn’t mean that they had actively collaborated with the government on investment strategy.

This narrative of Pierre Omidyar being politically and financially separate from the Obama White House is a vitally important one. In recent weeks, the site’s reporters have taken their fight right to the President’s doorstep with headlines like “The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency’s Role in Torture for Years,” claiming that the administration has deliberately withheld thousands of documents relating to the CIA’s role in detention and interrogation of prisoners. Any sniff that First Look’s owner, publisher and chief editorial recruiter has close ties to the White House could undermine the whole premise of the organization.

Speaking to the Daily Beast, documentary maker Jeremy Scahill mentioned his boss explicitly when comparing the cozy relationship between other news organizations and the White House. First Look, he insisted, would be different…

I think that the White House, whether it is under Republican or Democrat, they pretty much now [sic] who they are dealing with. There are outlets like The Daily Beast, or The Huffington Post that have risen up in the past decade, but they are very quickly just becoming part of the broader mainstream media, and with people that have spent their careers working for magazines or newspapers or what have you, and the White House believes they all speak the language on these things. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won’t know what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? Glenn?”

Scahill’s question is a good one — and it’s also very easy to answer: If the White House has a problem with First Look, it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll pick up the phone and call Pierre Omidyar. [Continue reading…]

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Obama just opened the door for Snowden’s immunity

o13-iconMichael Maiello writes: Today, Charlie Savage at The New York Times reports that the Obama administration will propose the end of the NSA’s bulk data collection program, replacing it with a more targeted, more thoroughly court supervised alternative. It is an imperfect solution for those who suspect that the FISA court is too eager to grant such requests but Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the paper that this was “a sensible outcome.”

As we are a good way through Obama’s second term as president, I think it’s more than fair to say that we would not be here, at the cusp of sensibility, without the actions of Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA contractor who now lives in Russia under the protection of Vladimir Putin. Snowden took and released an uncounted number of sensitive documents from his employers and is responsible for disclosing the breadth and scope of the NSA’s global telecommunications surveillance program. Had the details of this program remained rumor and whisper as they were for the bulk of Obama’s tenure, it’s a fair bet that nothing would be changing now. [Continue reading…]

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Udall pushes Obama on classified Senate CIA interrogation report

n13-iconThe Hill: Recent events only intensify the urgency to release a classified Senate study on Bush-era CIA interrogations, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) wrote to President Obama on Thursday.

Udall thanked Obama for expressing his “commitment” last week to declassifying the report. A public airing, Udall said, would allow the country to move past “this dark chapter” in our history.

“The American People cannot have faith that the Agency is acting effectively and within the law until the flaws of this program are acknowledged and the CIA’s misrepresentations are finally corrected,” Udall wrote in his letter.

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David Bromwich: The leader Obama wanted to become and what became of him

Doesn’t this just say it all?  After Majority Leader Harry Reid went the ultimate mile for the president, loosing the “nuclear option” on the Senate to wipe out Republican filibusters of a bevy of log-jammed presidential nominations, and after the Republicans — the president’s proudly disloyal opposition — had fumed to their hearts’ content, Obama still couldn’t get his nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division confirmed.  The culprits in a Congress where, from the White House point of view, evil has been every shade of Republican turned out to be seven disloyal Democrats.  Despite a “sustained closed-door effort” by Obama and his aides, they voted the nominee down.  Think of it as a little parable for the Obama presidency.

Meanwhile, in foreign policy, the din has been thunderous when it comes to Vladimir Putin and events in Ukraine.  Denunciations of the Russian president have rung from every quarter in Washington.  Sanctions against individual Russians have been issued with broader sanctions threatened and Secretary of State John Kerry has led the way.  But so far it’s been a Charge of the Lite Brigade.  Kerry actually had the chutzpah to say of the Russian troops sent into the Crimea, “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext.”  And the former senator, who had voted for the invasion of Iraq (to deal with Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction program), did it straight-faced.  Had the situation not been so grim, it would have been pure stand-up.  

The poor people of Ukraine are, of course, caught in the ring with global heavyweights and wannabes.  And the action’s been hot and heavy.  For one thing, the White House seems to have leaked German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private suggestion to the president that, in a conversation they had, Putin had been “in another world” — i.e. deranged.  (It was assumedly a good way for the White House to depth charge her relationship with the Russian president.)  As for Putin, if he’s crazy, by all accounts he’s crazy like a fox. He’s managed to go to “war” with what’s left of the Red Army and as the leader of a far more ramshackle state than the Soviet Union without a shot so far being fired.  He’s been punching visibly above his weight.

Thematically true to the Obama era, Washington has no less visibly been punching below its weight.  Its theme, widely announced, has been to “isolate” Russia, particularly economically.  Even as Republican congressional representatives were clambering aboard the Good Ship Sanctions (while continuing to denounce the president), the Obama administration hasn’t been able to rally those who actually matter: its European allies.

Yes, they’ve all said the right words in the rhetorical war that’s been underway, but in a fashion new in the trans-Atlantic relationship, even Great Britain has balked at Washington’s urgings to impose real sanctions on the Russians.  And no wonder: unlike the U.S., the Germans and others have significant trade relationships with that country and rely on it for natural gas supplies, none of which are they eager to imperil.  Here, too, for all the sound and fury signifying little, Obama seems to have been trumped by Putin.

The president’s inability to get much of significance done, no matter the topic, has become legendary.  In this, he may be the perfect symbol of our age.  His is a presidency in a time of decline.  As TomDispatch regular David Bromwich indicates today in a sweeping character portrait of the man we’ve never quite come to know, he’s had an uncanny knack for embodying the waning of American power.  Whether at home or abroad, it seems as if that power is somehow mysteriously draining out of Washington.  As Bromwich suggests, the president’s words can still soar, but the actions he proposes show a remarkably consistent inability to leave the ground. Tom Engelhardt

The voice
How Obama became a publicist for his presidency (rather than the president)
By David Bromwich

Like many days, March 3rd saw the delivery of a stern opinion by President Obama. To judge by recent developments in Ukraine, he said, Russia was putting itself “on the wrong side of history.” This might seem a surprising thing for an American president to say. The fate of Soviet Communism taught many people to be wary of invoking History as if it were one’s special friend or teammate. But Obama doubtless felt comfortable because he was quoting himself. “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” he said in his 2009 inaugural address, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” In January 2009 and again in March 2014, Obama was speaking to the world as its uncrowned leader.

For some time now, observers — a surprisingly wide range of them — have been saying that Barack Obama seems more like a king than a president. Leave aside the fanatics who think he is a “tyrant” of unparalleled powers and malignant purpose. Notions of that sort come easily to those who look for them; they are predigested and can safely be dismissed. But the germ of a similar conclusion may be found in a perception shared by many others. Obama, it is said, takes himself to be something like a benevolent monarch — a king in a mixed constitutional system, where the duties of the crown are largely ceremonial. He sees himself, in short, as the holder of a dignified office to whom Americans and others may feel naturally attuned.

A large portion of his experience of the presidency should have discouraged that idea. Obama’s approval ratings for several months have been hovering just above 40%. But whatever people may actually think of him, the evidence suggests that this has indeed been his vision of the presidential office — or rather, his idea of his function as a holder of that office. It is a subtle and powerful fantasy, and it has evidently driven his demeanor and actions, as far as reality permitted, for most of his five years in office.

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Obama has bungled his negotiations with Putin

a13-iconFred Kaplan writes: The most startling thing about the crisis in Ukraine is how horribly all the actors have played their hands.

First, the Ukrainian parliament, after stepping up to power, drastically overstepped its bounds, dissolving the courts and ousting President Viktor Yanukovich by fiat rather than through legal processes of impeachment—thus giving Russian President Vladimir Putin the sliver of an excuse to declare the new leaders “illegitimate” and to intervene under the pretense of restoring “order.”

Then, Putin went overboard, not merely bolstering the security of Russia’s naval base on the coast of Crimea (an autonomous republic of Ukraine that once belonged to Russia) but mobilizing 30,000 troops to occupy the entire enclave. This was unnecessary, since Putin already, in effect, controlled Crimea. It may also prove stupid, as the move’s violence has further alienated Ukrainians, raised suspicions among Russia’s other ex-Soviet neighbors, and roused resistance from otherwise indifferent Western nations.

Which leads to President Obama, who has responded to the aggression by imposing sanctions—a cliché of foreign policy that usually has no effect, but in this case will almost certainly make things worse.

Sanctions only work (and, even then, rarely) when they are universal, when they truly hurt the regime being targeted, and when they coincide with—or prompt—political change. Russia fits none of these categories. Too many European nations are too dependent on Russian gas supplies or bank deposits to make sanctions bite or endure. None of the sanctions under discussion are knockout blows; no conceivable sanctions would compel Putin (or any Russian leader) to surrender Ukraine. And regime change in Moscow is hardly on the horizon.

This crisis will be settled by making things somehow right with Ukraine—keeping it secure from further encroachments and ensuring that its government reflects the will of its people. The path toward both goals runs through the upcoming elections in May. And neither goal can be accomplished—no free and fair election can take place—without Russian involvement. [Continue reading…]

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