How ‘Looking Forward’ Tripped Up Obama & How He May Have Gotten Sucked In
Published on Thursday, March 13, 2014 by Consortium News
How ‘Looking Forward’ Tripped Up Obama
by Robert Parry
When historians set off to write the story of Barack Obama’s administration, they will have to struggle with why the 44th President chose not to hold his predecessor accountable for grave crimes of state and why he failed to take control of his own foreign policy.
This failure, which began with Obama’s early decision to “look forward, not backward” and to retain much of George W. Bush’s national security bureaucracy, has now led Obama into a scandal over the CIA’s resistance to the Senate Intelligence Committee drafting of a long-delayed report on the Bush-era policy of torturing “war on terror” detainees.
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Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was, in part, driven by public revulsion over the bloody conflict in Iraq and revelations about the torture of detainees and other crimes that surrounded Bush’s post-9/11 “war on terror.” Yet, after winning the White House, Obama shied away from a clean break from Bush’s policies.
Obama was persuaded to staff much of his national security team with “a team of rivals,” which meant retaining Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates (something no previous president had ever done), appointing hawkish Sen. Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State, and ordering no shake-up of Bush’s military high command, including media-favorite Gen. David Petraeus.
Longtime CIA apparatchik Brennan, who was implicated in some of Bush’s most controversial actions, was named Obama’s White House counterterrorism adviser. As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote, Brennan was “a senior CIA official during President George W. Bush’s ‘dark side’ days of waterboarding detainees, renditioning suspects to Mideast torture centers and making up intelligence to invade Iraq.”
Part of the reason for Obama’s timidity may have been his lack of experience and his fear that any missteps would be seized on by his opponents to question his fitness for the job. By surrounding himself with Bush’s advisers and Democratic adversaries, he may have thought that he was keeping them safely inside his tent.
The Democratic Party also has a very thin bench of national security experts. Official Washington has been so dominated by foreign policy “tough-guy-ism” for decades – at least since Ronald Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter in 1980 – that most Democrats who could survive a congressional confirmation hearing have had to bow to this prevailing sentiment.
There’s also the U.S. news media, which readily joins any war-fevered stampede. Obama may have calculated that his presidency would have been trampled by endless recriminations if he had fully repudiated Bush’s legacy.
GETTING SUCKED IN
Continued at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/13