Party On!
The War Party Ascendant
By Tom Engelhardt
It was the end of the road for Chuck Hagel last week and the
Washington press corps couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about
writing his obituary. In terms of pure coverage, it may not have been
Ferguson or the seven-foot deluge of snow that hit Buffalo, New York,
but the avalanche of news reports was nothing to be sniffed at. There
had been a changing of the guard in wartime Washington. Barack Obama’s
third secretary of defense had gone down for the count. In the phrase of the moment, he had “resigned under pressure.” Sayonara, Chuck!
With a unanimity that crossed political lines, the accounts
read as if written by a single reporter. The story went something like
this: two years earlier, President Obama had brought in Hagel, a
decorated Vietnam War veteran and former Republican senator with a
reputation for being leery about the overuse of American military power,
to wind down the war in Afghanistan, rein in military critics, and put
the Pentagon budget on something closer to a peacetime footing. After a
bruising Senate confirmation hearing from which he never recovered, he
proved poor at “messaging” the president’s policies, had a “crappy relationship”
with National Security Adviser (and Obama buddy) Susan Rice, proved a
weak manager at the Department of Defense as well as a “weak link” in
the Obama national security team, and could never break into the
president's tight-knit circle of insiders who -- everyone agreed -- had a
nasty habit of “micromanaging” America’s wars (rather than, it seemed, letting the military do what needed to be done). In the end, the president “lost confidence” in him. It was a “mutual” firing or at least Hagel had advanced somewhat voluntarily toward the edge of the cliff before being pushed off.
A subcategory of Hagel reports also bloomed, again adding up to something like
a single story. In them, various journalists and commentators offered
instant speculation on whom the president would invite to fill Hagel’s
post. Topping everyone’s “short list”:
Senator and former Army Ranger Jack Reed of Rhode Island, war fightin’
liberal and former Pentagon official Michèle Flournoy (much beloved by
neocons and Republicans), and hawkish former Pentagon “weapons buyer” Ashton Carter (the ultimate nominee). Unfortunately for the press, Reed and Flournoy promptly made mincemeat out of the collective wisdom of the moment, emphatically removing their names from consideration. Politico reported
the Flournoy rejection this way: “Flournoy’s withdrawal comes amid
speculation President Barack Obama is looking for a candidate who would
be deferential to a White House that’s increasingly exerting control
over Pentagon decisions.” Nothing, however, could stop the march of the
news, whose focus simply switched
to other potential job applicants. Striking was the eagerness of
assorted journalists and pundits to act like employment agency
headhunters vetting exactly the same list of candidates for the
president.
Such journalism, of course, qualifies as the very definition of
insiderdom and it led, implicitly or explicitly, to the crowning of
Barack Obama as a “war president”
for the final two years of his term. In the end, however, the media
was less reporting on developments than reproducing them. The result: a
record as collectively claustrophobic as post-9/11 Washington itself.
These days, it’s often pointed out by those who pass for Washington
critics of the Obama administration that the crises are backing up like a
Thanksgiving traffic jam across a remarkable swath of the planet -- and
that the president’s national security team has proven “dysfunctional”
when it comes to dealing with them. It's seldom acknowledged, however,
that the most essential crisis isn’t in Ukraine or Iraq or Syria or
Afghanistan or Iran, but in Washington. There, a bankrupt 13-year-old
policy of war to the horizon remains, unbelievably enough, in the
ascendancy and “war fever” seems to be breaking out yet again.
In this context, it's curious that four crucial aspects of war,
American-style, were missing from the blitz of Hagel reportage. Here's a
rundown.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175930/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_war_to_the_horizon/#more
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