Guilt-Tripping, the Obama Way

Barack Obama doesn't call his annual buck-raking confab in Chicago a "democracy forum" for nothing. He believes that everybody should have a fair and equal share of the blood on his hands. 

You can almost see the droplets flying like a fleet of Predator Drones in a line straight from his joystick of a scolding finger, right down to all those "complicit" people in his target audience. He doesn't call his media empire Higher Ground Productions for nothing, after all.  His empire even owns and controls the Pod Save America show where he  offered his remarks to his hosts, both of whom worked in his White House.

From flattery of his forum's attendees as the "future heroes" whose explicit assignment from Obama was to put a more "humanitarian" face on capitalism, Obama was forced by events to also make a quick, self-serving pivot to gaslighting mode. From Politico:

“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” he said in an excerpted interview with Pod Save America released Saturday.

Reflecting on his presidency, Obama posed the question, “Well, was there something else I could have done?”

He could have answered his own question by acknowledging what he had in fact done during his eight years as president. While paying lip service to the plight of the Palestinians, Obama did not admit his own direct role in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims. He didn't admit that he'd actually found inspiration and justification for his own drone assassination program from a group of Israeli lawyers who had preceded the full-scale genocide in Gaza by targeted assassinations of  Hamas members - and whatever civilians were in the vicinity at the time.

This targeted killing program, which got underway in the 90s in Israel in response to a wave of suicide bombings by Hamas, was roundly criticized by US officials at the time.

Then, of course, came the 9/11 attacks. It wasn't long before the War on Terror was proclaimed by the Bush administration, and killing anyone, at any time for any reason, became the de facto US policy. This especially held true for Muslims in so-called "tribal areas" and US-occupied war zones.

By the time Obama took office, targeted killings were the norm. Gone were the antiwar protests against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There was little to no backlash from the public, even when the New York Times (with full White House approval) revealed the gruesome extent of the "Disposition Matrix" - Obama's own  project of piecemeal genocide by drone. All Muslim men in the prime of life were deemed to be "enemy combatants."

At a 2012 security conference in El Paso, Texas, Roel Elkabetz, a brigadier-general for the Israel Defense Forces, bragged to his US counterparts that "We've learned lots from Gaza...it's a great laboratory!"

Eric Holder, Obama's attorney general, went on to actually plagiarize the Israeli lawyers who had first laid out the case for episocic  drone and bomb attacks on Palestinians. One of these Israeli lawyers, as The Intercept reported in 2018, later became a professor of human rights and humanitarian law at Harvard University. Unlike Obama, this particular lawyer acknowledged her own direct role in having gotten the genocide ball rolling all those decades ago.  

Amos Barshad wrote in that article that Eric Holder, lifted verbatim from Israel the extra-legal rationale for what is the most infamous of all Obama's drone killings:

The  memo directly quotes the ILD’s argument in the PCATI (Palestine) case. “Although arrest, investigation and trial ‘might actually be particularly practical under the conditions of belligerent occupation, in which the army controls the area in which the operation takes place,’” the memo reads, “such alternatives ‘are not means which can always be used,’ either because they are impossible or because they involve a great risk to the lives of soldiers.” A U.S. drone killed al-Awlaki in September 2011 in Yemen.

For Obama to now chide his audience to talk to people they don't agree with -because otherwise you are just sloganeering and ignoring nuance - is cynical and hypocritical.  He certainly never conversed with Al-Awlaki, or even with Al-Awlaki's parents when they pleaded in vain for a meeting with him to try to dissuade him from his execution order. He certainly didn't talk to the teenage son of Al-Awlaki before one of his drones r killed the boy and some of his friends as they were innocently eating pizza.

To the extent that Obama has acknowledged his role as lord high executioner of the United States, he glosses over it with the usual "higher ground" rhetoric to excuse all manner of crimes, both his own and those of others in his global social, political and economic cohort.

Just as he now lectures the world on their alleged "complicity" in war and violence, he's also lectured the thousands of his own drone victims, actually trying to make them responsible for their own deaths. This grotesque passage in his "Promised Land" memoir particularly stands out:

I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead."

It's a variation of the old Pontius Pilate excuse. Having disclaimed responsibility for murder, Obama doesn't even feel the need to wash his hands of murder on a much more epic scale. He merely flicks the guilt away at everybody else. 

Maybe Caroline Kennedy can give him another Profile in Courage award. Maybe the Nobel committee can give him another peace prize. Better yet, maybe the Hollywood that he so adores can give him an Oscar for best performance by a political actor iin the horror-fantasy genre. He also probably deserves the Most Valuable Player award in the world series of conflagration. He does, after all, have a very mean curveball. He pitches so fast and so loose that whenever his foul balls hit somebody in the head, they never even see it coming. And that is their own fault. They are complicit just for existing.