Joan Didion and Darryl Pinckney face off in the latest New York Review of Books, Didion suspicious of Obamamania, Pinckney undoubtedly in the grip of it. I must confess I felt for both arguments, but there was one paragraph in particular in Pinckney's comments that made me realise that expectations have now got well out of control:
The election of Senator Obama to the presidency signals our return to a nation whose government respects law and order. As president, Obama could put an end to the technological banditry of missions over Syria and Afghanistan designed to target our enemies and then to take them out with missiles, as in the climactic scene of George Clooney's film Syriana. It has actually happened that the target turned out to have been a wedding and US officials denied that the casualties were civilian and then apologized for those casualties once it was pretty clear that they had been civilian. President Obama could renounce shock and awe, the shortsighted policy that resulted from the proposition that a war can be largely won without having to commit ground troops. He could also bring us back to the idea that the Geneva Conventions are a good thing. President Obama will certainly save the Supreme Court and therefore the US Constitution. The integrity of our institutions has been guaranteed, restored.Respect for law and order. Tick. Support for the Geneva convention. Tick. Liberal appointments to the Supreme Court bench. Tick. No more use of remote bombing... erm, what?! You think so? Do you really think so? That Obama is going to renounce the use of a military tool which has proven to be one of the most effective in the modern era because it exposes the United States to virtually no risk of human casualties? A tool that he's more or less explicitly said he'll use against a US ally, Pakistan, if he gets the chance to take out senior Al Qaeda operatives? And do you really think that committing ground troops instead of "shock and awe" is a guaranteed way of avoiding civilian casualties and winning hearts and minds? My Lai, anybody? Falluja?
I'm not trying to say that it's a good thing that the US bombs people from afar. But it defies all conceptions of political reality to believe that there's a nice way of subjecting a regime and killing its people. It also defies all evidence to assume that Obama is, deep down, a member of a leftist semi-pacifist group that won't ever push the button on cruise missiles and doesn't believe in the maintenance of American power. Clinton bombed - because it allowed him to project US power without seeing more Black Hawks down - and he managed to take out a medicinal factory in Sudan because of it. Bush criticized him for being ineffective in 2000, then he did the same thing for most of the next eight years. He combined this with more boots on the ground; and that didn't work out too well, either, Mr. Pinckney.
When it comes to the next crunch time, Obama will drop bombs, too. I worry that some people have been so blinded by the manifest disaster of the last administration that they have lost all sense of the continuities in American history which defy the change of leadership at the top. There are bigger things than just being a nice guy, and one of those bigger things is the infrastructure and bureaucracy of the American military presence throughout the world.
1 comments:
There's also the slight matter of the shock to the national psyche of the attack on 9/11. This event was so devastating that the main reaction of the Bush administration was to identify any regime with even a remotely-plausible possibility of waging a similar attack and taking them out. Hence, the invasion of Iraq. No President of the USA is going to risk a similar attack when it could be prevented by pre-emptive action, especially by pre-emptive action undertaken remotely and with little or no risk of loss of US life.
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