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War, War, War See other War, War, War Articles Title: Obama edges to the dark side Obama edges to the dark side As consensus grows regarding the futility of US national security policy, concerns arise over Barack Obama's strategy. Mark LeVine Last Modified: 16 Sep 2010 15:45 GMT Candidate Obama swept the electoral college on a political platform of change, however President Obama has continued numerous policies implemented by his predecessor [Reuters] Possibly the most dramatic mea culpa in Presidential history, Bill Clinton, newly appointed as UN Special Envoy for Haiti, admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US policy of compelling poor developing countries to buy US agricultural products at subsidised prices, which destroyed local agricultural sectors, was a disaster. “I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else." For where Clinton helped lay the groundwork for the demilitarisation of America's political and economic systems through his uncritical embrace of neoliberalism (which, despite the "liberal" in the label, inevitably leads to neoconservatism and war), Obama, with the greatest of care and deliberation, is heading to the 'dark side' that the millions of Americans who voted for him did so with the justified expectation that he'd avoid. Politics of insanity? The warning signs that President Obama's trajectory would depart from his campaign rhetoric were clear from the beginning. Like when the newly minted President chose for his senior economic advisor's men like Lawrence Summer, Clinton's one time Treasury Secretary, who were responsible for the policies that besides destroying Haiti's rice crop, also enabled a million and one corporate get rich schemes such as the sub-prime mortgage bonanza whose collapse has left the country in its current disastrous condition. Another clue was surely the fact that Obama's defence spending from the start outstripped his Republican predecessor's, even though his campaign reached national prominence precisely with his pledge to end the war in Iraq, which should logically have meant a major reduction in the military budget. To be sure, we can understand how hard it would have been for a Democratic president significantly to reduce defence spending in the midst of war. But Obama was elected to do hard things, and given the urgency of the escalating recession and the souring of public opinion regarding both Iraq and Afghanistan, he could have taken control of the national discourse surrounding the ‘Really Existing War on Terror’ and begun a process of steering the country back towards some measure of fiscal and moral sanity. Indeed, can one consider spending upwards of a trillion dollars a year on defence - enough money to cure most of America's economic and social woes, not to mention much of the world as well - anything less than insane? The false choice of human rights vs. national security Instead, President Obama has essentially continued almost every major Bush security policy, either by default or design. State secrets, targeted killings, renditions and indefinite detention, opposing the right of habeas corpus, preventing victims of admitted torture from seeking judicial redress, expanding the Afghan war while moving - however gingerly - to secure a long-term presence in Iraq; all these must surely be making Bush, and especially Cheney, happy and wealthier men. As Michael Hayden, Bush's last CIA Director, put it in a recent interview, "Obama has been as aggressive as Bush" in defending executive prerogatives and powers that have enabled and sustained the ‘war on terror.’ But just how close to the dark side Obama has moved became evident in the last couple of weeks, specifically from two angles. In the first, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court decision allowing former CIA prisoners to sue companies that participated in their rendition and torture in overseas prisons. In deciding that the plaintiffs could not sue despite an ample public (rather than classified) record supporting their claims, Judge Raymond C. Fisher supported the Obama Administration's contention that, in his words, sometimes there is a "painful conflict between human rights and national security" in which the former must be sacrificed to preserve the latter. But this is an utterly ludicrous concept, since a core reason for so much of the frustration, nihilistic anger, radicalisation and ultimately violence involved in Islamist terrorism and insurgencies lies precisely in the long term, structural denial of the most basic human rights by governments in the region, the lion's share of whom continue to be supported by the United States despite their behaviour on the grounds of ‘national security’. What neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor the President seems to understand is that there can be no contradiction between human rights and national security, since the absence of human rights can never but lead to a lack of security. What's more, the very idea in the globalised era that one country's "national" security (especially that of the global "hyper-power," the United States) can be defined apart from and in contrast to the security of other nations is so ridiculous. One wonders how supposedly intelligent people, like former law school professors - turned presidents, can in good faith imagine and declare it. A complete rebuttal of US war justifications Even more troubling was the release last week of two reports from bi and non-partisan study groups regarding the best possible course forward in Afghanistan. The reports, "A New Way Forward: Rethinking US Strategy in Afghanistan," published by Washington-based Afghan Study Group, and the "Strategic Survey 2010," released by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, both conclude that "a Taliban takeover is unlikely even if Washington reduces its military commitment" in Afghanistan, in good measure because the conditions that allowed the first Taliban takeover in the 1990s no longer exist and can't easily be repeated. As important, "there [are] no significant Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan today, and the risk of a new 'safe haven' there under more 'friendly' Taliban rule is overstated." Indeed, the unusually blunt critique of the US-British Afghan policy by the normally staid IISS was made precisely because the think tank believes that the current path, far from addressing the threat of Islamist terrorism, is in fact a serious threat to the security interests of the two countries. Equally important, according to one of the Institute's directors and former senior British Intelligence official Nigel Inkster, al-Qa'eda is unlikely to be able to create a major threat in other countries currently high on the US military-intelligence radar, such as Yemen and Somalia. These reports are important not merely due to their conclusions, which vitiate the entire rationale for continuing the war in Afghanistan. More so is the fact that if these two documents, based largely on non-classified information and sources, have reached the same fundamental conclusion, then there is no way that the US and allied military and intelligence communities haven't reached the same determination. President Obama is by all accounts a decent man who unlike his predecessor does not enjoy leading his country in war time. His political future and legacy depend in large part on successfully navigating the United States away from a war economy and towards rebuilding it along more innovative and sustainable lines. And yet he is deepening the War in Afghanistan even though he and his senior advisor's and commanders must know full well that doing so is a disastrous folly. Even though they must understand that it will likely produce precisely the outcome the policies were supposed to avoid - greater hatred and violence against the United States in the heart of Central Asia, and from there, across the Muslim world. Perhaps some day President Obama will write a memoir or testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and echo, or even evoke, President Clinton's sad testimonial to the arrogance of power and wilful ignorance seems all too often to produce in the leaders entrusted with it. If so, it will be good fodder for historians and commentators, but of little comfort to the untold masses of peoples - Afghans, Pakistanis, Americans, and who knows whom else - who will continue to be devastated by the President's inability to look the truth square in the face and do what he was elected to do: lead his country, away from greed, cynicism, and despair, and towards hope and renewal. Mark LeVine is a professor of history at University of California, Irvine . His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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One wonders how many times the Kenyan is going to be called a "law school professor" when he was not. Yes, one wonders about these things. Chicago Law School Faculty Hated Obama Thursday, March 11, 2010 Chicago Law School faculty hated Obama “because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool” The smartest genius President evah is nothing more than a carboard cutout. A fraud. Doesn’t exist. We don’t even know how he did in school because to this day his transcripts are sealed. Turns out now that when he was an instructor at the Chicago, his colleagues who were actual Professors didn’t like him and didn’t want him. Obama’s position was obtained through political channels. From Doug Ross: To be (a lawyer) or not to be… Is the President’s resume accurate when it comes to his career and qualifications? I can corroborate that Obama’s “teaching career” at Chicago was, to put it kindly, a sham. I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about “Barry.” Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn’t even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him he didn’t have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position. He was never a professor and was hardly an adjunct. The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement). Consider this: 1. President Barack Obama, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, is no longer a “lawyer”. He surrendered his license back in 2008 possibly to escape charges that he “fibbed” on his bar application. … 4. A senior lecturer is one thing. A fully ranked law professor is another. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “Obama did NOT ‘hold the title’ of a University of Chicago law school professor”. Barack Obama was NOT a Constitutional Law professor at the University of Chicago. 5. The University of Chicago released a statement in March, 2008 saying Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) “served as a professor” in the law school, but that is a title Obama, who taught courses there part-time, never held, a spokesman for the school confirmed in 2008. 6. “He did not hold the title of professor of law,” said Marsha Ferziger Nagorsky, an Assistant Dean for Communications and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago School of Law. 7. The former Constitutional senior lecturer cited the U.S. Constitution recently during his State of the Union Address. Unfortunately, the quote he cited was from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. Here was that video that I posted back in January (Video: Former Constitutional Law Professor Obama makes up quotes in SOTU not found in the Constitution): 10. By the way, the promises are not a notion, our founders named them unalienable rights. The document is our Declaration of Independence and it reads: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 11. And this is the same guy who lectured the Supreme Court moments later in the same speech? When you are a phony it’s hard to keep facts straight. For a constitutional senior lecturer, it’s also noteworthy that Obama doesn’t know what car insurance covers UPDATE: Doug Ross updates with this: Most Transparent President Ever Has Bar Records Redacted This Week, Leaving Only Traces of His Existence Some Betamax Videos and a Fraternity Pin President Obama’s Occidental College transcripts have never been released. His Columbia transcripts are, likewise, AWOL. And his Harvard Law transcripts also haven’t been made public. Finally, it’s reported, he never published any articles while at Harvard, yet somehow served as Editor of Law Review. That would make him unique among editors, according to insiders. Even John “D Student” Kerry was guilt-tripped into releasing his transcripts. Curiously, since I relayed a report of Obama’s “teaching career” at Chicago (he was apparently never a law professor, as some have claimed), the Illinois Bar has decided to partially redact what little public information it had available on its website related to the President’s legal status. UPDATE #2: Another from Doug Ross: Rub a dub dub, how many IDs does one profile need? An anonymous tipster points out that the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of Illinois has gone through some amazing contortions maintaining a single database record for a retired attorney named Barack Obama. Obama is only transparent in the sense that his past is invisible.
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