The Liberals' Grand Bargain
We'll trade you Afghanistan and Pakistan for Guantanamo
and torture – deal?
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 In
the age of Obama, we're going to have to get used to the new zeitgeist
in Washington, and in the media: the perpetual high moral dudgeon
of contemporary liberalism. While the Bush administration had its
own style of moralizing – the rhetoric of "liberation," the idea
that we were doing the people of Iraq a favor
by invading and occupying their country – the Obama crowd is much
more sophisticated than that, and, simultaneously, more vulgar.
On the one hand, they are all up
in arms about torture,
and the lawless treatment of the Guantanamo inmates, and on the
other hand the prospect of a much wider "war on terrorism" – extending
not only into Afghanistan
and Pakistan,
but the ring
of 'stans
that encircle the new battlefield, – doesn't seem to bother them
in the least.
 Amid
hosannas
from liberals, Obama declared
an end to torture, and promised
to close the Guantanamo facility within a year. This has been the
signature issue of the left-blogosphere, and the estimable Glenn
Greenwald led the way, with his relentless
exposure
of the pro-torture would-be appointees to top positions in Obama's
CIA. It's too bad, however, that Glenn's fellow progressives haven't
followed his
lead on other issues, such as the war
crimes engaged in by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
Guantanamo
is a symbol of the Bush years that has to go, for a number of reasons
– one of which is that we don't want to have to lock up captives
from the Afghan front in that infamous penitentiary. This would
give the
war we're planning
to fight in Pakistan the moral taint of the Bush years, and implicitly
acknowledge that Obama's Afghan "surge"
is merely an escalation of Bush's war.
In his remarks
to the U.S. State Department on Thursday, President Obama made it
clear that our policy of relentless military aggression in the region,
far from being over, has barely begun.
Read
the rest of the article
January
24, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
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