![]() ![]() He was a politician whose career depended on protecting the American people. It was not as though Obama could have turned a blind eye to terrorism. “He has relentlessly questioned the efficacy of force,” said the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg toward the end of Obama’s two terms, “but he has also become the most successful terrorist-hunter in the history of the presidency, one who will hand to his successor a set of tools an accomplished assassin would envy.” This outcome was scary, no matter how tightly controlled, humanely practised and judiciously governed – and that was before the true identity of Obama’s successor became known only six months after Goldberg wrote. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Imagesīeyond its other shortcomings, the transformation of American war incurred a gargantuan risk that its defenders and its opponents largely failed to notice before it was too late. Medea Benjamin, being ejected from Obama’s talk at the National Defense University, Washington, in 2013. Expansion and humanisation went together, branding Obama’s wars with an ominous trademark. ![]() And he transformed the “war on terror” itself. Obama continued a process begun in the later Bush years, but he more credibly advertised the country’s uprightness as steward of the least-brutal form of war possible. ![]() Though what they saw as the rule of law meant little more than self-regulation, their commitment to humane standards of fighting war – while by no means perfect in legal theory or military practice – had rhetorical power for some Americans, significant effects on the fighting itself, and helped produce endless war. The president’s men and women, Savage has written, “were trying to fight al-Qaida while adhering to what they saw as the rule of law”. But that lawyerliness often served as an elaborate rationalisation process. “Lawyerliness suffused the Obama administration,” observed Charlie Savage, the New York Times reporter who broke many explosive national security stories during the Obama years. The rise of the armed drone empire under Obama’s watch was merely the symbol of the extension and expansion of endless war. As the worst sins of the prior administration were disowned, Obama’s lawyers claimed authority to continue war indefinitely across space and time, devising formal legal frameworks for targeted killings. In just the first few months of 2009, after Obama took the oath of office, the initial metamorphosis of American war into humane form was achieved. Obama expanded the “war on terror” to an awesome extent, while making it sustainable for a domestic audience in a way his predecessor never did – in part because Obama understood the political uses of transforming American warfare in a humane direction. Obama had run as a kind of anti-war candidate in his fairytale 2008 campaign, and when it turned out that he was a hard-bitten pragmatist, in this and other areas, many of his supporters were surprised. Instead, it is control by domination and surveillance. This new kind of American war is revealing that the most elemental face of war is not death. The US’s conflicts abroad remain brutal and deadly, but what’s frightening about them is not just the violence they inflict. The very idea of more humane war may seem a contradiction in terms. Yet, at the same time, the US’s military operations have become more expansive in scope and perpetual in time by virtue of these very facts. Absolutely and relatively, fewer captives are mistreated and fewer civilians die than in the past. Countries like the US have agreed to obey those obligations, however permissively they interpret them and inadequately apply them in the field. Today, there are more and more legal obligations to make war more humane – meaning, above all, the aim of minimising collateral harm. It was the moment of greatest moral clarity about war during a presidency that did more than any other to bring its endless and humane American form fully into being.įor all its routine violence, the American way of war is more and more defined by a near complete immunity from harm for the American side and unprecedented care when it comes to killing people on the other. Obama himself had been more reflective at the event, engaging with her criticisms, which led to even deeper self-criticism of his own. The Washington Post later dismissed her as a “heckler”. ![]() She was swiftly ejected by military police and the Secret Service. During his speech, Benjamin interrupted the president to criticise him for not having closed Guantánamo Bay and for pursuing military solutions over diplomatic ones. On, the peace activist Medea Benjamin attended a speech by President Barack Obama at Fort McNair in Washington DC, where he defended his administration’s use of armed drones in counter-terrorism. ![]()
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