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The War Party: From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier
Jeremy Scahill
November 21 2021, 7:30 p.m.
MANY DEMOCRATS, LIBERALS, traditional conservatives, and even some leftists continue to tell themselves that the election of Joe Biden was the first step toward restoring U.S. standing in the world after the damage caused by Donald Trump. And in a variety of ways — many stylistic and some substantive — that perspective has merit. But when it comes to national security policy, the U.S. has been on a steady, hypermilitarized arc for decades. Taken broadly, U.S. policy has been largely consistent on “national security” and “counterterrorism” matters from 9/11 to the present.
The ascent of the charlatan businessman Trump to the presidency in 2016 was a logical — if somewhat on-the-nose — plot twist in the U.S. imperial saga that managed to distill many truths about this nation into a four-year televised and live-tweeted debacle.
The continued media drumbeat that Trump remains the gravest enduring threat to U.S. democracy is fueled by legitimate concerns over Trump’s frantic efforts to use the office of the presidency to overturn the election results, which came to a head with the violent demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. These dangerous actions, taken in concert with ongoing Republican efforts at voter disenfranchisement and the peddling of false conspiracy theories, merit serious concern. The Trumpist movement, especially its members in Congress, poses a clear threat to the democratic process. But even in the face of this threat, the bipartisan imperial consensus was so strong that the Democrats continued to increase Trump’s national security powers throughout his presidency.
The Democratic party, in its self-tailored version of history, has always been a steadfast force of resistance against GOP excesses and abuses. The Democrats appear to see no contradiction between fighting Republican attacks on voting rights and their own enthusiastic embrace of empire in foreign policy. Without support from the leadership of the Democratic Party — and votes from rank-and-file congressional Democrats — many of the worst national security policies of the past two decades would have been impossible to implement or would have required enormous political battles or an even greater, and abusive, use of executive power to accomplish.
If the Democratic Party offered a true resistance to the GOP, the history of the post-9/11 world would be very different. Instead of California Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee standing as the lone vote in the entire Congress against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force — the “blank check” for global war — days after September 11, 2001, we would have seen the majority of Democrats join her in a chorus of opposition and restraint. Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin, would not have been the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. The legislative authorities for the Iraq War would have been thwarted without the support of a majority of Democratic senators: 29 voted in its favor, including the current president. Without that backing, the Bush-Cheney administration would have had to openly and publicly own its maniacal belief that when it comes to “national security” policy, the executive branch can and should function as a de facto dictatorship.
While a vocal minority of Democrats spent much of the two terms of the Bush administration fighting against the Iraq War and the grave human rights abuses being committed by the CIA and military, the leadership of the party consistently abetted the Bush-Cheney agenda. When it mattered most, the party failed to offer more than meager protests. After the Democrats gained a House majority in the 2006 midterm elections, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear there would be no accountability at the highest levels of power. “I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table,” Pelosi asserted. “We pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”
There is an understandable tendency to view the past 20 years of U.S. militarism as a defining era unto itself. And, in some crucial ways, the full spectrum of U.S. responses to the September 11 attacks did alter the world and, with it, the U.S. way of war. But at their core, the most consequential actions emanating from Washington, D.C., after 9/11 were already in motion. The Bush administration came to power with an eye toward regime change in Iraq. But it did so emboldened by the bipartisan vote during Bill Clinton’s tenure that made regime change official U.S. policy, backed up by constant bombings of Iraq throughout Clinton’s two terms. Even Bernie Sanders, then a House representative, supported that bill, which was largely the work of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century. Under Clinton, the U.S. was already moving toward a system of remote lethal strikes and small wars, though it was much more reliant on legacy systems like cruise missiles rather than the now ubiquitous armed drones. The precursor of the Patriot Act was passed with significant support from both parties, with Biden serving as one of its lead architects, a fact he regularly and proudly cited. The U.S. was already operating a well-oiled economic warfare machine with its use of crippling sanctions in an effort to overthrow governments or punish populations into submission.
Yemeni children look at graffiti protesting U.S. drone strikes on Sept. 19, 2018, in Sanaa, Yemen.Photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images
Targeted Killings
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, the party had an opportunity to showcase what an antidote to Bush-Cheney policymaking would look like. This prospect was a major part of the success of the Obama campaigns against both Hillary Clinton, an Iraq War supporter, and John McCain, a notorious militarist. Instead, Obama expanded some of the most dangerous aspects of the Bush-Cheney war apparatus while shielding the CIA, military leaders, and the entire Bush administration from any accountability. Obama surged troops in Afghanistan and empowered both the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command to engage in expanded global “targeted killing” operations. He embraced the widespread use of covert operations, ratcheted up drone strikes in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, initiated air wars in Somalia and Yemen that endure to this day, and waged a disastrous regime change war in Libya.
Obama used his credibility among the base of the Democratic Party in an effort to normalize assassination as an acceptable, if not preferable, tool of U.S. policy. Obama relied so heavily on drone strikes that they became a policy unto themselves, and he publicly asserted the right of the U.S. president to assassinate American citizens by means of “targeted killing,” based on the vague notion that they might someday threaten national security or even U.S. interests. While the U.S. government has long engaged in covert assassinations, Obama transformed and legitimized such operations with his intricate attempts to rebrand the practice and to publicly argue in favor of its legality and morality.
Obama’s Justice Department defended former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others against charges of war crimes in civil litigation and refused to hold the CIA accountable for its widespread use of torture and extraordinary rendition. Obama simultaneously prosecuted whistleblowers with a vengeance using a warped interpretation of the 1917 Espionage Act. His CIA director, John Brennan, lied about the agency spying on U.S. Senate torture investigators, and his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath when testifying about mass surveillance and the bulk collection of communications among U.S. citizens.
By the time Obama prepared to leave office, his administration had built up what amounted to a secret parallel judicial system to enforce the long-standing U.S. global killing regime. During Obama’s second term, his administration cobbled together a ramshackle set of guidelines for targeted killings that he said he hoped would bring legal structure, oversight, and transparency to his signature military tactic. But these guidelines had no teeth that the next commander in chief could not easily knock out. In selling his targeted killing policy, Obama repeatedly banked on the notion that he could be personally trusted to make these decisions in secret. That mentality led to a total absence of meaningful checks, by the time the 2016 election was decided, against a dangerous and now institutionalized claim of sweeping and lethal presidential powers.
President Donald Trump speaks to the troops during a surprise Thanksgiving Day visit at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan on Nov. 28, 2019.
Photo: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
War Powers
Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton sent shockwaves through the national security state and the Washington, D.C., political establishment. On war policy, Trump was difficult to assess before assuming office because his messaging and pronouncements were often contradicted by other statements or moves he made. As a candidate, and as president, Trump would stake out Ron Paul-esque libertarian opposition to U.S. wars and militarism, and in the next speech — and sometimes next breath — he would engage in a grotesque soliloquy about taking a nation’s oil, murdering families of terror suspects, or wiping countries off the map. Rhetoric can itself be dangerous when it is emanating from the mouth of a man who controls nuclear weapons and vast military forces, so it was always reasonable to be deeply concerned over the temperamental ravings of the 45th president. Yet in the end, most of his rants fizzled into bluster. This was in part a byproduct of the competing factions within the administration pushing contradictory agendas, including on war policy and the response to the 2020 election results.
In matters of war, the truth is that there were not many substantive national security anomalies brought about by Trump’s control of the White House. Trump was far more belligerent than Jimmy Carter, but he was not even in the same league as Bush and Cheney when it came to global mass killing. While steering clear of the sustained large-scale ground operations that marked both Bush presidencies in Iraq, Trump and Obama showed great willingness to use U.S. military and CIA force, particularly in undeclared war zones, and ran operations that consistently killed large numbers of civilians. Obama initiated new military action in more countries than Trump.
Trump swiftly undid many of the modest rules implemented during Obama’s second term aimed at reducing civilian deaths in U.S. drone and other airstrikes and gave greater latitude to field commanders and mid-level officials to authorize such strikes. Trump dispensed with Obama’s “superfluous” policies for acknowledging deaths caused by CIA actions and lowered the threshold for killing unknown people, particularly “military aged males.”
“Trump easily did away with virtually all the policy constraints and scholarly debates. His rules glance at law, and lay bare how easily a president thinks it may be set aside in service of vague ‘national security interests.’ It’s hard not to see these rules as a license to kill,” argued Hina Shamsi, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project. “The Trump rules served as open-ended authorization for the United States to kill virtually anyone it designates as a terrorist threat, anywhere in the world, without reference to the laws prohibiting extrajudicial killing under human rights law. The Trump rules may seem more extreme but in core ways they merely continue an unlawful U.S. extrajudicial killing program.”
While using the military to continue pummeling Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Trump expanded the U.S. drone war ratcheted up by Obama in Somalia. By the end of Trump’s presidency, the civilian death toll from U.S. drone strikes, mostly during Obama and Trump years, was astonishing. A report from U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars found that “at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes” since 9/11.
Yemen policy under Trump was in step with decades of U.S. support for the brutal dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, and he did his absolute best to top the Bush family in cozying up to the royals. Once Trump took power, a narrative emerged that pretended it was Trump, not Obama, who started the U.S.-fueled horror show in Yemen. While he certainly escalated U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s murderous campaign, it was the Obama administration that began a secret and sustained U.S. bombing campaign in Yemen in 2009 and gave the Saudis the official green light for aerial bombardment of Yemen in 2015 with the aid of U.S. weapons. In September 2016, at the end of his presidency, Obama approved a $115 billion arms sale to the Saudis, which at the time was “the most of any U.S. administration in the 71-year U.S.-Saudi alliance.” Under pressure from human rights activists and some members of Congress, Obama excluded the sale of certain precision-guided munitions, citing the worsening situation in Yemen. Trump reversed Obama’s exclusion and included the weapons as part of his own “tremendous” arms deal with the Saudis announced in May 2017. Absent the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Turkey in 2018, it is not certain that the effort to confront U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen would have gained its unprecedented momentum. Trump’s grotesque embrace of the Saudi dictatorship, particularly his defense of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the murder, was also a decisive factor in gaining some Republican support for cutting off weapons shipments. Trump vetoed the legislation.
Trump’s appointment of neoconservatives to his war cabinet, chief among them John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, at times resulted in a strange mixture of Cheney-style policymaking that undermined Trump’s more dominant rhetorical projection of a right-wing libertarian foreign policy outlook. Among Trump’s most dangerous military acts as president was the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad. That strike risked starting a full-blown war with Iran. While many Democrats expressed strong opposition to the strike, there is and has long been a powerful chorus of voices within the party that actually believes more military confrontation of Iran is warranted, so it is hardly a given that Democrats would have stopped Trump from moving forward. Some top Democrats, while criticizing Trump for keeping the operation secret from congressional leaders and offering other procedural objections, celebrated the assassination. Then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Suleimani was a “notorious terrorist” and that “no one should shed a tear over his death.”
For four years, the most prominent figures in the Democratic Party, along with most of its congressional foot soldiers, told us that Trump was a Russian stooge and the most dangerous president in history — all while simultaneously lavishing his administration with sweeping surveillance powers and record-shattering military budgets. In 2019, months before the Suleimani strike, Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have prohibited such actions, but it was removed from the final bill. “Any member who voted for the NDAA — a blank check — can’t now express dismay that Trump may have launched another war in the Middle East,” Khanna wrote on Twitter after Suleimani’s assassination. “My Amendment, which was stripped, would have cut off $$ for any offensive attack against Iran including against officials like Soleimani.”
The NDAA passed with overwhelming Democratic support. We saw the same pattern when Democrats sided with their Republican colleagues in extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of the key state organs of domestic spy operations. In 2020, at the peak of Trump’s insanity, 10 Democrats blocked an effort by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to stop the FBI’s warrantless surveillance of web browser history. Some leading Democrats joined with neoconservative Republicans in the waning days of Trump’s presidency in an effort to impede him from ending the war in Afghanistan.
It would be a mistake to view these congressional actions as hypocrisy. They should be seen, rather, as key indicators of the core agenda of the Democratic Party leadership on matters of militarism and “national security.” Even with a president in power whom its members constantly portrayed as an unstable authoritarian, the Democratic Party refused to close the spigot on the commander in chief’s vast powers.
Continued..
theintercept.com
Jeremy Scahill
November 21 2021, 7:30 p.m.
MANY DEMOCRATS, LIBERALS, traditional conservatives, and even some leftists continue to tell themselves that the election of Joe Biden was the first step toward restoring U.S. standing in the world after the damage caused by Donald Trump. And in a variety of ways — many stylistic and some substantive — that perspective has merit. But when it comes to national security policy, the U.S. has been on a steady, hypermilitarized arc for decades. Taken broadly, U.S. policy has been largely consistent on “national security” and “counterterrorism” matters from 9/11 to the present.
The ascent of the charlatan businessman Trump to the presidency in 2016 was a logical — if somewhat on-the-nose — plot twist in the U.S. imperial saga that managed to distill many truths about this nation into a four-year televised and live-tweeted debacle.
The continued media drumbeat that Trump remains the gravest enduring threat to U.S. democracy is fueled by legitimate concerns over Trump’s frantic efforts to use the office of the presidency to overturn the election results, which came to a head with the violent demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. These dangerous actions, taken in concert with ongoing Republican efforts at voter disenfranchisement and the peddling of false conspiracy theories, merit serious concern. The Trumpist movement, especially its members in Congress, poses a clear threat to the democratic process. But even in the face of this threat, the bipartisan imperial consensus was so strong that the Democrats continued to increase Trump’s national security powers throughout his presidency.
This reflexive bipartisan militarism stands in stark opposition to the Democratic Party’s sweeping and fallacious rhetoric that the bad face of the U.S. emerges only when Republicans seize executive power — and that the sole remedy is electing Democrats. Civilian victims of Barack Obama’s drone strikes might have another view. Before Trump, according to Democratic doctrine, the evils of U.S. policy originated with George W. Bush and his “co-president” Dick Cheney. Yet under both Trump and Bush, the rhetoric from many Democrats was pathologically disconnected from their support for ever-expanding militarist and surveillance policies.
The Democratic party, in its self-tailored version of history, has always been a steadfast force of resistance against GOP excesses and abuses. The Democrats appear to see no contradiction between fighting Republican attacks on voting rights and their own enthusiastic embrace of empire in foreign policy. Without support from the leadership of the Democratic Party — and votes from rank-and-file congressional Democrats — many of the worst national security policies of the past two decades would have been impossible to implement or would have required enormous political battles or an even greater, and abusive, use of executive power to accomplish.
If the Democratic Party offered a true resistance to the GOP, the history of the post-9/11 world would be very different. Instead of California Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee standing as the lone vote in the entire Congress against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force — the “blank check” for global war — days after September 11, 2001, we would have seen the majority of Democrats join her in a chorus of opposition and restraint. Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin, would not have been the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. The legislative authorities for the Iraq War would have been thwarted without the support of a majority of Democratic senators: 29 voted in its favor, including the current president. Without that backing, the Bush-Cheney administration would have had to openly and publicly own its maniacal belief that when it comes to “national security” policy, the executive branch can and should function as a de facto dictatorship.
While a vocal minority of Democrats spent much of the two terms of the Bush administration fighting against the Iraq War and the grave human rights abuses being committed by the CIA and military, the leadership of the party consistently abetted the Bush-Cheney agenda. When it mattered most, the party failed to offer more than meager protests. After the Democrats gained a House majority in the 2006 midterm elections, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear there would be no accountability at the highest levels of power. “I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table,” Pelosi asserted. “We pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”
There is an understandable tendency to view the past 20 years of U.S. militarism as a defining era unto itself. And, in some crucial ways, the full spectrum of U.S. responses to the September 11 attacks did alter the world and, with it, the U.S. way of war. But at their core, the most consequential actions emanating from Washington, D.C., after 9/11 were already in motion. The Bush administration came to power with an eye toward regime change in Iraq. But it did so emboldened by the bipartisan vote during Bill Clinton’s tenure that made regime change official U.S. policy, backed up by constant bombings of Iraq throughout Clinton’s two terms. Even Bernie Sanders, then a House representative, supported that bill, which was largely the work of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century. Under Clinton, the U.S. was already moving toward a system of remote lethal strikes and small wars, though it was much more reliant on legacy systems like cruise missiles rather than the now ubiquitous armed drones. The precursor of the Patriot Act was passed with significant support from both parties, with Biden serving as one of its lead architects, a fact he regularly and proudly cited. The U.S. was already operating a well-oiled economic warfare machine with its use of crippling sanctions in an effort to overthrow governments or punish populations into submission.
In its malignant genius, the Bush-Cheney administration — stacked with career hawks who knew how to work the levers of power — saw opportunity in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They saw the value of tapping into the rage, shock, and, most importantly, fear that gripped the nation in the aftermath of the terror attacks to accelerate the implementation of their agenda. The Democratic Party willingly folded itself into the Bush administration’s aspirations and bestowed upon it sweeping war and surveillance powers. The most significant milestones of the past two decades lie not with the victories of extroverted villainous Republicans like Bush or Trump, but in the synergy that exists among the various political factions between U.S. elections.
Yemeni children look at graffiti protesting U.S. drone strikes on Sept. 19, 2018, in Sanaa, Yemen.Photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images
Targeted Killings
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, the party had an opportunity to showcase what an antidote to Bush-Cheney policymaking would look like. This prospect was a major part of the success of the Obama campaigns against both Hillary Clinton, an Iraq War supporter, and John McCain, a notorious militarist. Instead, Obama expanded some of the most dangerous aspects of the Bush-Cheney war apparatus while shielding the CIA, military leaders, and the entire Bush administration from any accountability. Obama surged troops in Afghanistan and empowered both the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command to engage in expanded global “targeted killing” operations. He embraced the widespread use of covert operations, ratcheted up drone strikes in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, initiated air wars in Somalia and Yemen that endure to this day, and waged a disastrous regime change war in Libya.
Obama used his credibility among the base of the Democratic Party in an effort to normalize assassination as an acceptable, if not preferable, tool of U.S. policy. Obama relied so heavily on drone strikes that they became a policy unto themselves, and he publicly asserted the right of the U.S. president to assassinate American citizens by means of “targeted killing,” based on the vague notion that they might someday threaten national security or even U.S. interests. While the U.S. government has long engaged in covert assassinations, Obama transformed and legitimized such operations with his intricate attempts to rebrand the practice and to publicly argue in favor of its legality and morality.
Obama’s Justice Department defended former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others against charges of war crimes in civil litigation and refused to hold the CIA accountable for its widespread use of torture and extraordinary rendition. Obama simultaneously prosecuted whistleblowers with a vengeance using a warped interpretation of the 1917 Espionage Act. His CIA director, John Brennan, lied about the agency spying on U.S. Senate torture investigators, and his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath when testifying about mass surveillance and the bulk collection of communications among U.S. citizens.
By the time Obama prepared to leave office, his administration had built up what amounted to a secret parallel judicial system to enforce the long-standing U.S. global killing regime. During Obama’s second term, his administration cobbled together a ramshackle set of guidelines for targeted killings that he said he hoped would bring legal structure, oversight, and transparency to his signature military tactic. But these guidelines had no teeth that the next commander in chief could not easily knock out. In selling his targeted killing policy, Obama repeatedly banked on the notion that he could be personally trusted to make these decisions in secret. That mentality led to a total absence of meaningful checks, by the time the 2016 election was decided, against a dangerous and now institutionalized claim of sweeping and lethal presidential powers.
President Donald Trump speaks to the troops during a surprise Thanksgiving Day visit at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan on Nov. 28, 2019.
Photo: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
War Powers
Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton sent shockwaves through the national security state and the Washington, D.C., political establishment. On war policy, Trump was difficult to assess before assuming office because his messaging and pronouncements were often contradicted by other statements or moves he made. As a candidate, and as president, Trump would stake out Ron Paul-esque libertarian opposition to U.S. wars and militarism, and in the next speech — and sometimes next breath — he would engage in a grotesque soliloquy about taking a nation’s oil, murdering families of terror suspects, or wiping countries off the map. Rhetoric can itself be dangerous when it is emanating from the mouth of a man who controls nuclear weapons and vast military forces, so it was always reasonable to be deeply concerned over the temperamental ravings of the 45th president. Yet in the end, most of his rants fizzled into bluster. This was in part a byproduct of the competing factions within the administration pushing contradictory agendas, including on war policy and the response to the 2020 election results.
In matters of war, the truth is that there were not many substantive national security anomalies brought about by Trump’s control of the White House. Trump was far more belligerent than Jimmy Carter, but he was not even in the same league as Bush and Cheney when it came to global mass killing. While steering clear of the sustained large-scale ground operations that marked both Bush presidencies in Iraq, Trump and Obama showed great willingness to use U.S. military and CIA force, particularly in undeclared war zones, and ran operations that consistently killed large numbers of civilians. Obama initiated new military action in more countries than Trump.
Stylistically, of course, there were many differences between Trump and former U.S. presidents, and his rhetoric was often terrifying and appalling. But in national security policy, Trump generally operated within the norms of the modern U.S. presidency and received mainstream praise for it. How could anyone forget the moments early in his tenure when establishment media pundits declared that Trump “became president” after he unleashed missiles on Syria or after he spoke during the State of the Union of a U.S. soldier killed in a deadly and unnecessary ground operation that he had authorized in Yemen?
Trump swiftly undid many of the modest rules implemented during Obama’s second term aimed at reducing civilian deaths in U.S. drone and other airstrikes and gave greater latitude to field commanders and mid-level officials to authorize such strikes. Trump dispensed with Obama’s “superfluous” policies for acknowledging deaths caused by CIA actions and lowered the threshold for killing unknown people, particularly “military aged males.”
“Trump easily did away with virtually all the policy constraints and scholarly debates. His rules glance at law, and lay bare how easily a president thinks it may be set aside in service of vague ‘national security interests.’ It’s hard not to see these rules as a license to kill,” argued Hina Shamsi, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project. “The Trump rules served as open-ended authorization for the United States to kill virtually anyone it designates as a terrorist threat, anywhere in the world, without reference to the laws prohibiting extrajudicial killing under human rights law. The Trump rules may seem more extreme but in core ways they merely continue an unlawful U.S. extrajudicial killing program.”
While using the military to continue pummeling Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Trump expanded the U.S. drone war ratcheted up by Obama in Somalia. By the end of Trump’s presidency, the civilian death toll from U.S. drone strikes, mostly during Obama and Trump years, was astonishing. A report from U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars found that “at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes” since 9/11.
Yemen policy under Trump was in step with decades of U.S. support for the brutal dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, and he did his absolute best to top the Bush family in cozying up to the royals. Once Trump took power, a narrative emerged that pretended it was Trump, not Obama, who started the U.S.-fueled horror show in Yemen. While he certainly escalated U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s murderous campaign, it was the Obama administration that began a secret and sustained U.S. bombing campaign in Yemen in 2009 and gave the Saudis the official green light for aerial bombardment of Yemen in 2015 with the aid of U.S. weapons. In September 2016, at the end of his presidency, Obama approved a $115 billion arms sale to the Saudis, which at the time was “the most of any U.S. administration in the 71-year U.S.-Saudi alliance.” Under pressure from human rights activists and some members of Congress, Obama excluded the sale of certain precision-guided munitions, citing the worsening situation in Yemen. Trump reversed Obama’s exclusion and included the weapons as part of his own “tremendous” arms deal with the Saudis announced in May 2017. Absent the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Turkey in 2018, it is not certain that the effort to confront U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen would have gained its unprecedented momentum. Trump’s grotesque embrace of the Saudi dictatorship, particularly his defense of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the murder, was also a decisive factor in gaining some Republican support for cutting off weapons shipments. Trump vetoed the legislation.
Trump’s appointment of neoconservatives to his war cabinet, chief among them John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, at times resulted in a strange mixture of Cheney-style policymaking that undermined Trump’s more dominant rhetorical projection of a right-wing libertarian foreign policy outlook. Among Trump’s most dangerous military acts as president was the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad. That strike risked starting a full-blown war with Iran. While many Democrats expressed strong opposition to the strike, there is and has long been a powerful chorus of voices within the party that actually believes more military confrontation of Iran is warranted, so it is hardly a given that Democrats would have stopped Trump from moving forward. Some top Democrats, while criticizing Trump for keeping the operation secret from congressional leaders and offering other procedural objections, celebrated the assassination. Then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Suleimani was a “notorious terrorist” and that “no one should shed a tear over his death.”
For four years, the most prominent figures in the Democratic Party, along with most of its congressional foot soldiers, told us that Trump was a Russian stooge and the most dangerous president in history — all while simultaneously lavishing his administration with sweeping surveillance powers and record-shattering military budgets. In 2019, months before the Suleimani strike, Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have prohibited such actions, but it was removed from the final bill. “Any member who voted for the NDAA — a blank check — can’t now express dismay that Trump may have launched another war in the Middle East,” Khanna wrote on Twitter after Suleimani’s assassination. “My Amendment, which was stripped, would have cut off $$ for any offensive attack against Iran including against officials like Soleimani.”
The NDAA passed with overwhelming Democratic support. We saw the same pattern when Democrats sided with their Republican colleagues in extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of the key state organs of domestic spy operations. In 2020, at the peak of Trump’s insanity, 10 Democrats blocked an effort by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to stop the FBI’s warrantless surveillance of web browser history. Some leading Democrats joined with neoconservative Republicans in the waning days of Trump’s presidency in an effort to impede him from ending the war in Afghanistan.
It would be a mistake to view these congressional actions as hypocrisy. They should be seen, rather, as key indicators of the core agenda of the Democratic Party leadership on matters of militarism and “national security.” Even with a president in power whom its members constantly portrayed as an unstable authoritarian, the Democratic Party refused to close the spigot on the commander in chief’s vast powers.
Continued..
From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier
The presidency of Joe Biden demonstrates, once again, that U.S. commitments to militarism and permanent global war are enduring and bipartisan.
theintercept.com
