100 Days In

Before handing out awards to congratulate President Obama for being the first black president to host an Easter Egg Roll or the first black president to struggle with his teleprompter, let us look at his real accomplishments thus far, good (yes, some) and bad (plenty).

President Barack Obama has endured a mountain of criticism for his cabinet nominees and members. A number (Geithner, Daschle, Sebelius) have been rightly deemed tax cheats and have embarrassed the president and the ones in charge of vetting candidates. Americans generally have a low tolerance for politicians who get away with something that would land normal folks in heap big trouble. The president’s claim of a "new era of responsibility" gets questioned when an unusual number of his nominees have tax troubles, especially when many Americans themselves are struggling, as well as when the president promises “change” by digging up Clinton-era partisan hacks. However, a compliant media has done much to keep the new president rather unscathed.

Upon the assumption of his office, Barack Obama was faced with an economic crisis not of his doing, but of which he took complete ownership. His method of alleviation was ramming through an economic stimulus bill in the same manner and through the same rhetoric of his much-detested predecessor: this emergency is too catastrophic to wait any longer; if we wait any longer, we will be doomed. The bill is too important to read. Pass it or we will all die. Sound anything like the Patriot Act?

After campaigning against 8 years of Republican corruption and proliferate spending, the president embarked on the aforementioned stimulus bill and the pork-laden omnibus bill, bringing the Obama budget soaring somewhere around $4,000,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2010. While the spending done by the Republicans during George W. Bush’s reign was beyond reprehensible and also worth protesting, the monumental debt already created under President Obama sends the message that Bush-era spending was only the beginning.

In the whole financial debacle, the president insisted that spending would get us out of the recession. That assertion assumes that since a lot of spending and bailouts got us into this mess, lots more spending and bailouts will get us out. It is an assertion that many Republicans share when they are in power that no matter how much short-term success it might generate, the value of the dollar continues to plummet and making the another recession inevitable. It is the same old solution only wrapped in a much bigger box.

One of the most defining aspects of the Bush administration was its "Global War on Terrorism," designed to quash tyranny abroad so that liberty in American can be preserved. Actions such as the Patriot Act and the excesses permitted to agencies like the TSA and others have certainly undermined American liberty at home. An incident at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, MO has already been chronicled here before, but another incident in the Southwest suggests that unarmed and unsuspicious Americans are still harassed by their government, even under the supposed civil liberty-minded President Obama (begin video at 8:01, then here, and here).

On the foreign policy front, President Obama promised change but so far has not delivered much. He quickly announced that American troops would be leaving Iraq by August of next year, that is, excepting the 50,000 "residual" forces that are scheduled to remain until at least 2011. However, as news trickles in that Sunni insurgents don’t play nice when the bribe money starts to dry up and civil war resumes, there will be added pressure on the president to keep troops there to pacify the latest uprising and make John McCain’s suggestion that troops stay there for 100 years sound like it came out of Barack Obama’s mouth.

Farther east, as the president promised, Obama has already escalated matters in the increasingly lawless Afghanistan. With poor supply lines, a disintegrating Pakistan quickly succumbing to the Taliban and more Afghans looking to the Taliban for help, American troops will be either relegated to being person bodyguards for President Karzai in Kabul or left to wander in the desert until they get picked off.

Why? There is nothing to be won in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is nowhere to be found. The Taliban is taking over again and the Afghans, notoriously xenophobic, are not resisting local thugs in favor of foreign armies. So the question must be asked again, why does the president want to wander in this graveyard of empires?

The recent and much-publicized Latin American trip drew a lot of attention, particularly from the president's critics on his right. He was called weak for merely sitting and listening to Nicaraguan Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega delivery an anti-American screed. President Obama was denounced for shaking the hand of Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez at the same summit. Rather than turning tables over in disgust over the president’s inclination to grin and bear it, perhaps he was acting like a new head of state should act: quietly. None of these Latin American clowns, who have wrecked their countries almost without exception, pose any threat to the United States. Are we supposed to shoot down any foreign head of state that has the audacity to question the God-given right of the American government to do whatever it wants around the world? The American Conservative columnist Daniel Larison rightly points out that there is nothing to fear from these goons: they thrive (or even survive) based on anti-American rhetoric. The president was right to either let them do their schtick or outright ignore them. It was an episode of calm disposition, something sorely lacking under President Bush.

The president’s dealings with the Somali pirates and hostage situation were swift and effective. The situation was rather quickly defused as the abducted captain was rescued and all of his captors were killed or surrendered. He dealt with stateless warriors in the only way that was manageable and despite calls from all corners to confront the stateless Somalia, (bombing them) he has rightfully deflected all pleas thusfar to enter into another tribal fiasco.

It has only been 100 days, but it looks like things are remaining very much the same. The new regime has only repackaged the same old disasters and called it "change." Some things have been good, as those that have been covered here, but the future is not very bright. Debt soars higher than sky-high and the foreign wars look here to stay, even under a Democratic president. As the old saying goes, people get the government they deserve.

Dangerous Torture

The big news last weekend, other than President Obama's (gasp!) handshake with Hugo Chavez, was that the previously-classified "torture memos" were irresponsibly declassified, revealing state secrets, and forfeiting pivotal information in the long war against "Islamofascism."

No sooner were the memos made public did President Bush's remaining supporters on talk radio and Fox News jump to the microphone in a race to be the first to claim that President Obama was playing politics with America's security. Sean Hannity called it "stupid." Rush Limbaugh called the president "naieve." Bill O'Reilly doesn't want to use guidelines found in the army field manual, while in the same conversation, Karl Rove called the action "lunacy" and "a psychological victory for the terrorists."

All of these outrages reveal the twisted logic that suggests that "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually make the country safer.

As tempting as this view is, it all acts on an assumption that waterboarding, the most controversial of the techniques, saves lives. Apparently saying "Waterboarding isn't torture" enough times makes it true (or deciding that anything said because of waterboarding makes it true as well). Or saying "But waterboarding worked!" enough times, even if it might be a little morally questionable, makes it right. If Machiavelli would have approved, then I guess that's all that matters.

We routinely hear that these techniques kept America safe. After 9/11, we hear, we couldn't take any chances. After 9/11, the government didn't know what to do so they used waterboarding to get to the bottom of the issue and try to prevent another attack. Let's examine that claim.

Before 9/11, Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States (1996) for stationing soldiers on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, supporting its corrupt regime, and offering unconditional support to the Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians.

In 2000, the naval destroyer USS Cole was targeted for bombing by bin Laden. Conservatives, especially since 9/11, have routinely pointed to the bombing of the Cole as evidence of Bill Clinton's negligence concerning the terrorist threat. In this case, they are right. And since they are right, it undermines the claim that torture or waterboarding works and is necessary in the "Global War on Terror."

This shows that the terrorist threat was bubbling just beneath the surface and that the U.S. government could have begun taking action against terrorists because they were showing themselves to be a threat to the U.S., or at least making the U.S. a target. And put this on top of the fact that the government already knew bin Laden was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Surely someone could have connected the dots: the Cole, the 1993 bombing, and a declaration, and figured out that something was brewing. For people who were paying attention to U.S. actions around the world, the horrors of 9/11 were not an earth-shattering or earth-changing event, but a predictable event.

So, we should have known that an event like 9/11 was coming. It could have been figured out by following world news through a major national newspaper or reading on the internet. It would not take waterboarding someone to figure out that the country was due for blowback from its foreign policies.

Also consider this: the media habitually tell the American people that the only people who participate in these horrific acts of terror are religious fanatics who desire to die for their faith. Events like 9/11 give credence to this view. So if part of being a terrorist means dying for the cause, why would they reveal anything under waterboarding or torture? Dying is the goal, isn't it? Why would they bother telling anything even if they knew anything if dying is the goal?

I now feel compelled to ask waterboarding defenders this: What did waterboarding 2 people, one of them the supposed mastermind of 9/11, a total of 266 times tell us about the terrorist attacks that curious internet users could not have found out for themselves?

What this boils down to is that torture or "enhanced interrogation" does nothing to make America inherently safer. The real fear that I have regarding these memos is not that by revealing their contents, they make America less safe because terrorists will be able to train for waterboarding. No, the real fear I have is that the contents of these memos will make America less safe because they can be used as a recruiting tool for the terrorists.

Just as the invasion of Iraq fueled terrorist recruiting because it was viewed as the conquest and rape of an innocent Muslim country, these memos will say to the Muslim world "We tortured."

We can debate until Judgment Day whether waterboarding is torture or not but in the Muslim world, they see an imperial power incarcerating Muslims and torturing them. That creates a further incentive for people who might not be inclined to to join the jihad to do so. And that is why this matters.

Our country has made a mess for itself by not understanding our enemy. The waterboarding issue is just another incident of missing the point.

If we want to make the waterboarding issue moot, then we must make the impetus for terrorism moot as well and come home.