Obama's Virtues

 

Obama’s Virtues: His Political and Military Calculations

Peter Schultz

 

                  “Yemen and the United States, 2010: As thousands of US troops deployed and redeployed to Afghanistan, the covert campaign in undeclared battlefields was widening. US drone strikes were hitting Pakistan weekly, while JSOC forces were on the ground in Somalia and Yemen and pounding the latter with air strikes. All the while, al Qaeda affiliated in those countries were gaining strength. When I met with Hunter, who worked with the JSOC under Bush and continued to work in counterterrorism under the Obama administration, I asked him what changes had taken place from one administration to the next. He quickly shot back: ‘There’s no daylight. If anything, JSOC operations have intensified under this administration, there’s been a greater intensity in what their being asked to do, where they are being asked to do it and how they’re being asked to do it,’ he told me. ‘There are things transpiring now, around the globe, that would be unthinkable to the Bush administration, not just because of vocal opposition within the cabinet, or within the Pentagon, but because they would not have the ultimate support of the president. In this administration, the president has made a political and military calculation – and this is his prerogative – that it is best to let the Joint Special Operations Command run wild, like a mustang, in pursuit of the objectives that [Obama] has set.’”

 

From Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, Jeremy Scahill, p. 350.

 

When you see the world as a battlefield, as our presidents have consistently done, then all the world’s inhabitants, civilian as well as military, are fair game, so to speak. As one Yemeni said in the aftermath of the massacre at al Majalah, where fourteen women and twenty-one children were incinerated by US missiles: “If they kill innocent children and call them as Qaeda, then we are all al Qaeda. If children are terrorists, then we are all terrorists.”

 

Exactly. When you turn the world into a battlefield, all humans are potential enemies and massacres are inevitable.