Obama’s smarts don’t compensate lack of vision

The contrasts between the current presidency and the previous one are mildly comforting (one feels adults are in charge at long last), but a dollop of cleverness and a dash of decency aren’t going to make up for continued chauvinistic group-think.

Obama finally acknowledged error in the handling of the Nigerian Christmas bomber, but saying that the state’s security systems failed to ‘connect the dots’ is an almost Freudian reminder that the whole bloated apparatus reeks of childish games invented more to satisfy the kiddies playing them than to provide us protection from real threats.

I get the exact same feeling when being herded through an airport screening line by TSA hard-ons obviously delighted with their opportunity to bark orders at us. It’s the mentality that causes people to applaud grotesquely stupid and criminal enterprises like torturing defenseless prisoners in Guantánamo and Bagram—it does nothing for our safety and destroys our moral fabric but feels great as revenge.

Obama’s practical orders to repair the system sound reasonable enough, but he’s making a play for the Jimmy Carter award by rushing to endorse Dick Cheney’s pathetic criticism that the new administration isn’t talking ‘war’ enough. What a great opportunity to draw a line between the old ways of doing things and the present and to say that fighting criminal terrorism isn’t really a ‘war’ that can be won with tanks, armies and occupations.

In fact, it’s precisely the tanks, armies and occupations that are fueling the terrorist mystique as any number of commentators point out, to no apparent effect whatsoever. Reports abound that both the would-be airplane bomber from Nigeria and the Jordanian double agent who blew up CIA agents at Khost were motivated by civilian deaths in wars carried out by American and Israeli troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza.

It was these imprecise drone attacks and slaughters at wedding parties that Obama the candidate criticized and then promptly escalated once we elected him. Like Carter in the late 1970s pumping up the dangers of Soviet expansion (in Afghanistan, we might recall), Obama is empowering his political enemies who will always be much better at belligerence and outraged martyrdom than he is.

Meanwhile, the spread of hatred for the U.S.-Israeli alliance and the dangers this poses for our personal safety and ability to travel around the world without fearing to show our passports is the great non-topic in our official punditry.

Finally, the Blackwater case illustrates perfectly how our double standard continues to dupe us and amaze the world. Turns out that these hired killers could not be charged with murdering Iraqi civilians because their statements about the incident were not properly obtained.

What an irony. The country that openly insists on the right to beat confessions out of anyone who happens to fall into our Gulag suddenly discovers it has a legal system where the accused have rights.

Unfortunately, you have to be on the right side of the powerful to possess and enjoy them, and this principle, now firmly established, will eventually come back to haunt our own population that naively thinks the mere possession of U.S. citizenship will protect it from the security behemoth’s increasingly arbitrary powers.