Petraeus' COIN baby was allowed to expire in its crib when the economy went south; it was just too expensive to feed and too time-consuming to raise. Biden's baby was lean and mean and didn't require all the humanitarian pampering; it fed on intel and focused killing. Petraeus was conveniently elbowed laterally to head the CIA.
The kid from Jakarta -- now the man who whacked Osama bin Laden -- sits dead-center in the middle of the new doctrine. In addition to secrecy, surveillance and focused killing, he has now added the development of Cyber Warfare to his quiver of 21st Century war-making skills.
Instead of following up on promises to promote peace and justice that led many Americans to vote for him, with his crony Joe Biden, President Obama has chosen the classic path of snuggling up to military power. It's a much safer and less risky pursuit than the former, since Fear and Violence are always powerful levers to manipulate when times are tough. Peace? Give me a break!
By all indications, Obama has successfully tamed the voracious military monster into a lean and mean purring cat in his hands. The devil's due will come with the need to keep on killing.
The Myth of Precision
In an amazing little essay ("A Game of Drones") in May's The American Conservative magazine, the Chilean journalist Ximena Ortiz puts all this in context. In her view, the United States is "enabled by a central idea," and that idea is what she calls a "precision-guided mythology [that] masks a brutal truth."
She cites a Washington Post-ABC poll that shows 77 percent of "liberal Democrats" support stepped-up drone attacks. "Killing foreigners -- and a smattering of US citizens -- by drone remains popular," she concludes. "The truth" that the policy is infuriating Yemenis and Pakistanis and getting us deeper into conflict with the Muslim world is, par for the course, lost in the cultural cacophony.
This mythology of precision, this Chilean journalist says, distinguishes us in our own minds from Third World people who torture, spy-on and kill in a much cruder manner. In the US, we're better. Our violence is precise and we employ it only when it's absolutely necessary.
President Obama is playing the Precision Myth for all it's worth. As an important adjunct to the Myth of American Exceptionalism, it allows Americans to feel good about themselves as they get away with murder. It will probably get Barack Obama re-elected in an election that only offers bad and worse.
May God have mercy on our souls.
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