The Cheney Effect (in the Obama Administration)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175560/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_the_cheney_effect_%28in_the_obama_administration%29_/

Back in September 2001, Dick Cheney was, according to Jane Mayer in The Dark Side, being chauffeured around Washington “in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers." In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, "rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger rear its head, "rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow."

Ah, weren’t those the days? How quiet, how boring his life must be now, his new ticker in place, hosting fundraisers for Mitt Romney in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, auctioning off lunches with himself for charity, and -- for a little genuine excitement -- slamming President Obama as an “unmitigated disaster.” And yet, what if thousands of miles from Washington, years from his "taking off the gloves” heyday, promoting “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and plunking for invasions in the Greater Middle East, his ghost still lives in the nation's capital, and not in some vague way somewhere in the Republican opposition, but deep in the beating heart of the Obama administration. It’s the sort of thought that should take you aback and yet Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author most recently of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, makes the case that the Cheney ticker is beating hard right now in President Obama’s chest. Don’t believe it? Then, take a deep dive into Cheney’s... I mean, Obama’s world. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Klare discusses imperial geopolitics as the default mode for Washington since 1945, click here http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2012/06/more-presidents-change.html or download it to your iPod here http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tomcast-from-tomdispatch-com/id357095817.)

Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney? Four Ways the President Is Pursuing Cheney’s Geopolitics of Global Energy

As details of his administration’s global war against terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known -- a war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175547/andrew_bacevich_the_golden_age_of_special_operations , and presidentially selected assassinations http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html -- President Obama has been compared http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/02/drone-wars-secrecy-barack-obama to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action. “As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/23/barack_oromney?page=0,0

When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president. As recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheney’s, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major powers.

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related

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175557/

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The New Obama Doctrine, A Six-Point Plan for Global War: Special Ops, Drones, Spy Games, Civilian Soldiers, Proxy Fighters, and Cyber Warfare

It looked like a scene out of a Hollywood movie. In the inky darkness, men in full combat gear, armed with automatic weapons and wearing night-vision goggles, grabbed hold of a thick, woven cable hanging from a MH-47 Chinook helicopter. Then, in a flash, each “fast-roped” down onto a ship below. Afterward, “Mike,” a Navy SEAL who would not give his last name, bragged to an Army public affairs sergeant that, when they were on their game, the SEALs could put 15 men on a ship this way in 30 seconds or less.

Once on the aft deck, the special ops troops broke into squads and methodically searched the ship as it bobbed in Jinhae Harbor, South Korea. Below deck and on the bridge, the commandos located several men and trained their weapons on them, but nobody fired a shot. It was, after all, a training exercise.

All of those ship-searchers were SEALs, but not all of them were American. Some were from Naval Special Warfare Group 1 out of Coronado, California; others hailed from South Korea’s Naval Special Brigade. The drill was part of Foal Eagle 2012, a multinational, joint-service exercise. It was also a model for -- and one small part of -- a much publicized U.S. military “pivot” from the Greater Middle East to Asia, a move that includes sending an initial contingent of 250 Marines to Darwin, Australia, basing littoral combat ships in Singapore, strengthening military ties with Vietnam and India, staging war games in the Philippines (as well as a drone strike there), and shifting the majority of the Navy’s ships to the Pacific by the end of the decade.

That modest training exercise also reflected another kind of pivot. The face of American-style war-fighting is once again changing. Forget full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian mainland; instead, think: special operations forces working on their own but also training or fighting beside allied militaries (if not outright proxy armies) in hot spots around the world. And along with those special ops advisors, trainers, and commandos expect ever more funds and efforts to flow into the militarization of spying and intelligence, the use of drone aircraft, the launching of cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized “civilian” government agencies.

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