I wish I could say that Leon Panetta’s book, Worthy Fights, will be the capstone of his wretched political career. But with Hillary likely to be the next president, I suspect Panetta’s repulsive attacks on Obama will only guarantee him position and influence to come. Everyone knows the 76 year old Panetta was Bill Clinton’s OMB Director and then Chief of Staff and then Obama’s Director of the CIA and then Secretary of Defense. Fe people know that earlier Panetta, a conservative by nature, was a Republican who worked for California Republican Senator Tom Kuchel and then for President Nixon. Always the opportunist, he switched parties in 1971, claiming the GOP had turned too extreme, ands was soon elected to Congress, where he was the typical New Dem/Blue Dog type DLC hack. He was another personnel mistake Obama blundered into. I’m sure he’s sorry now.
Panetta confides that he thought Obama was wrong on some key decisions, just as Gates and Clinton did in their memoirs. Which makes this reader ask: Why did these officials continue to serve a president with whose policies they often seemed to disagree? Retrospective candor is fine, but wouldn’t it have been better to speak out at the time and perhaps even resign on principle? The country would have been poorer without their service, but we need officials who will tell the truth publicly, in real time, before they make the book deal.…What has already made news is Panetta’s criticism of Obama. It clearly troubled Panetta, who loved his time in Congress, that Obama “was believed not to have found his time as a senator very rewarding and to be disdainful of Congress generally.” He writes that Obama’s “decision-making apparatus was centralized in the White House” far more than that of any other administration he had seen, reducing the importance of Cabinet posts.The comments on Iraq and Syria are blistering. As Panetta saw it, the White House was “so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw [in 2011] rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.” Obama’s departure left Iraq to its sectarian misleaders and prefigured the disastrous explosion this year of the Islamic State.As for Syria, Panetta says that Obama “vacillated” on his “red line” pledge to take military action against chemical weapons in 2013. He writes, “The result, I felt, was a blow to American credibility.”
So he and Hillary— both vile corporate Dems of the worst kind— are on record “warning” Obama. I’m sure Team Clinton is delighted and, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in a post for The Intercept this week, the glorification of endless war as the official policy of America— will be front and center again, just as soon as they get rid of the conflicted interloper and an appropriately warmongery Clinton is back in the White House.
Leon Panetta… said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama— who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed)— for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?This war— in all its ever-changing permutations— thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes… The last thing the Washington political class and the economic elites who control it want is for this war to end. Anyone who doubts that should just look at the express statements from these leading Democrats, who wasted no time at all seizing on the latest Bad Guys to justify literally decades more of this profiteering and war-making.
I’m going to finish up my thoughts on this first thing tomorrow morning. This one was going way too long already.