“A decade of war is now ending,” Barack Obama proclaimed from the steps of the Capitol in the first minutes of his presidency. “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”
Five and a half years of war later, the promise of peace is Obama’s most broken one. Instead, the people got another war president.
Obama fought and eventually wound down President George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that regard, he was a war President mostly by inheritance. But he wasn’t done fighting.
Libya was the first war of choice for the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Obama in March 2011 intervened in Libya’s civil war, without congressional authority. Obama’s Tomahawk missiles and fighter jets helped depose dictator Moammar Gadhafi, leaving a power vacuum that would be filled with violence, sectarianism, instability, and terrorism.
Obama’s Libya war lasted about six months, and afterwards, he didn’t stay out of Africa long. On a Friday afternoon in October 2011, Obama quietly announced that the U.S. military would go into Uganda to hunt murderous militant Joseph Kony.
Obama then ran for reelection as a war president. The 2008 motto “Yes We Can” was replaced at the 2012 convention with the chant “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive!” Democratic speakers mentioned bin Laden at that event more often than they mentioned wind, solar, and geothermal energy, combined. John Kerry used the war in Libya as an applause line among the Democratic faithful, crowing that with the illegal intervention, Obama “made America lead like America again.”
In the background, Obama has waged a drone war in Africa and Asia. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has estimated that Obama’s drones have killed 1,937 people in Pakistan in 339 attacks since 2009. U.S. drones have struck dozens of times In Somalia and Yemen, killing hundreds — including some civilians.
“Targeted killing is now so routine,” the Washington Post reported, “that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.”
Leading the charge was Obama’s own “assassination czar,” John Brennan. For his efforts in creating and justifying the drone Kill List — from which Americans weren’t exempted — Brennan got a promotion from Obama, to director of the CIA.
Throughout all this, much of the Left applauded. Liberal war critic Jeremy Scahill noted that Obama’s presidency was effective as turning progressives into hawks: “Had John McCain won the election, it is difficult to imagine such widespread support, particularly among liberal Democrats, for some of the very counterterrorism policies that Obama implemented.”
In his second term, Obama tried to launch another regime-change war in Syria. A year later, he re-invaded Iraq, and this week, in a noteworthy twist, Obama began attacks on the enemies of the very regime he had once considered changing in Syria.
There is no real debate over whether Obama is a war president. The question is why he is a war president.
First, war is the health of the state, and belief in war reflects belief in the state. The 2012 Democratic motto “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive,” can be understood as a Profession of Faith in Government. Government can save all worthy subjects and slay the unworthy. Obama — who bristles at the suggestion that there are limits to what government can accomplish — has profound faith in the state.
Second, personnel is policy. Obama has surrounded himself with pro-war personnel. Samantha Power and Susan Rice are ideologically dedicated to humanitarian military interventions. This humanitarian war impulse drove Obama in Libya, and seems to have motivated him again against ISIS.
Third, conservative hawks have another explanation for why Obama finds himself at war again: He’s too passive, and weakness invites violence. In particular, Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq may have made room for ISIS’s expansion there, and his hesitance in 2012 to enter Syria could have been costly in two ways; strengthening Assad and radicalizing the rebels. By shying from decisive action, the argument goes, Obama has invited war.
But on one level, it may have been inevitable that Obama would become a war president. When the War Department became the Defense Department, and the military-industrial complex sprang up, war became a permanent fixture of American politics. Obama wasn’t the first president to promise peace and deliver war. Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection on keeping America out of the Great War. Nixon promised a secret plan to exit Vietnam quickly. George W. Bush pledged a “humble foreign policy.”
It naive and simplistic to flatly blame Obama for giving us another half-decade of war. After all, some of the war he inherited from Bush. And even if he wanted to end the “decade of war,” peace is never achieved unilaterally. But we can blame Obama for promising peace — a promise he was never going to keep.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
