Defining The Obama Doctrine: Of Doves and Drones

For a man awarded the Nobel Peace Prize within months of taking office, began
his second term with an impassioned vow to bring troops home from Afghanistan
and owes his political career to his opposition to the war in Iraq, President
Obama’s presidential Doctrine is murky at best.
Due to recently leaked Justice Department memo, we learned the Obama
administration’s infamous drone kill list includes U.S. citizens. To make things
worse, it took the administration a fews to agree to provide information to
Congress as to who is on that list and why. This has put Obama at odds with even
some of his most long-standing progressives allies.
Progressives were relatively quiet when Obama deemed closing
Guantanamo Bay politically unattainable and then expanded the Bushera
use of warrantless wire-tapping. Now, many are fed up. Every
decision short of putting troops on the ground -- from Iran to Syria to his
infamous leading from behind strategy in Libya -- is denigrated by the
right as weakness.
Obama appears to be, ungracefully, balancing drones and doves without bothering
to explain or justify the contradiction. He appears to be, while reducing the U.S.
military footprint in the Arab World, waging a covert war against individuals as
opposed to countries.
If playing the middle is supposed to help avoid the trappings of left and
right, it ain’t working.
As a progressive, I gotta say it’s not the drones. If 9/11, Iraq and
Afghanistan taught me anything, it’s that the war on terror is more like
the war on drugs than a traditional military engagement. There’s no
Terror country with a capital called Jihad. The enemy, I get it, is illusive.
When you find them, you don’t can’t just gear up an Army and storm the
Castle. The problem is Obama’s unwillingness to articulate his position.
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s just arrogance, or if there is a Doctrine at
all? Perhaps he is just a man responding to events?
The Bush Doctrine, even Sarah Palin knows by now, was simple. It was
all about the preemptive strike and this idea that our national security
depended upon our willingness to strike the first blow.
With Clinton, it was more nuanced but no less profound. From the escalation in
Somalia to Serbia bombings to invading the Haiti and all the diplomatic capital
spent on Irish and Middle East peace negotiations, Clinton believed instability
anywhere was a threat to stability everywhere.
Prior to sending troops to Serbia, Clinton famously said this:
“It's easy...to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that
valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or
some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of
our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether
we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is,
what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and
spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be
everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and
where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.”
Shockingly, Obama’s Doctrine is more nuanced than Clinton’s yet less
articulate than Bush. Obama can remain quiet on the drone issue if he
wants. He does not have to campaign again, and as long as the end result
is fewer U.S. soldiers killed, I doubt the political backlash will build to critical
mass. But the long-term repercussions of this policy could prove even more
hazardous than the Bush-era torturing of suspected terrorists, and
ultimately we, the American people, deserve an explanation.