On November 25, I found out that Obama planned on retaining Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, and my immediate assumption was that my suspicions were true and Obama was just as much a chickenhawk as George W. Bush. Honestly, with a transition advisory team of about 50 people, nobody could think of a better Defense Secretary than the guy chosen by George W. Bush? Haven’t we all been craving a complete 180 from everything even remotely associated with that president whose name comes up when you Google “miserable failure?” The impression I’ve gotten from the people on the Left for the last 6 years is that we’re all holding our noses until January 20th, 2009, at which point we’ll breathe a sigh of relief. But there was no real uproar against this betrayal that I could detect.
There was token resistance to the idea on Daily Kos, which is by some accounts the left of the left of the left of the Internet. A look at the comment thread there shows dissatisfaction with the decision, but faith in Obama is somehow unshaken. It doesn’t even enter their minds to suspect the new president might not be the same one that was advertised to them. Politicians are not worthy of that much trust.
If keeping the Bush-era Pentagon on board wasn’t bad enough, Obama is also filling other cabinet posts with chickenhawks. According to the article, Chris Bowers of OpenLeft feels “incredibly frustrated.” He should. In fact, he should feel betrayed, and all the anti-war Americans who voted for him should feel silly for making so many assumptions about his foreign policy, sight unseen. Another OpenLeft post mentions that Obama may keep up to 70,000 troops in Iraq past 2011, which is not news, since the man never actually promised a complete withdrawal, which makes me wonder why he was such a darling of people in the anti-war movement during the campaign. The only ones promising an end to the occupation of Iraq were Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. (It occurs to me to wonder: With so many people angry about the occupation, why were only fringe candidates promising a solution?)
At any rate, Obama is shaping up to be more of the same when it comes to war. The Post-WW2 United States has been involved in tens of armed conflicts, all of them undeclared wars, and most of them damaging the US reputation abroad, stretching our resources far too thinly, and creating the very monsters the Global War on Terror is meant to fight. It would have been nice to have a president promise a change from this 50-year tradition of such flippant squandering of the military.
