It’s taken more than 100 days but this week was the first time I felt like my own personal honeymoon with Obama might be over. His decision to block the release of photos that depict US troops and agents torturing enemy combatants feels like a blunder on many levels: As much as I like his willingness to change his mind on issues when presented with new information (unlike old whatsisname), the rhetoric that followed his about face on this question (or “flip-flop” as the folks at Fox are already calling it) seems just plain wimpy.
“The president believes in this special case the damage that would be done to troops and our national security has not been fully presented to the court,” Robert Gibbs told the press corps (before having a tizzy over someone’s cell phone going off) on the same day that Obama said something about “a few bad apples” in the military. Conveniently ignoring the bad apples in the Department of Defense and the vice-president’s office who gave the go-ahead to torture people.
As much as Democrats still feel it necessary to proclaim that they love a man in a uniform, I think the notion that new Abu Ghraib like images would provoke more anti-American feeling (as the president readies himself for a June visit to Egypt and another encounter with the Muslim world) misses the point. What will the Arab press make of the notion that we have images so awful we don’t want them to see them? Give some credit to the power of the imagination. The transparency he campaigned on should be just that: a willingness to show the world what we have done and therefore more fully disassociate ourselves from it. To do otherwise makes him seem like Bush’s successor.
Nearly as disheartening was his decision, announced yesterday, to retain the military tribunal system Bush championed that tries terrorists not as ordinary bad guys — with human and civil rights — but as kind of super bad guys who should be tried secretly. The way they do in dictatorships. “This is the best way to protect our country, while upholding our deeply held values,” the president said.
O yeah, chief? Which values are those — the need to compromise on issues when being attacked by the right about being soft on national security? The belief that the person with the most authority, when it comes to issues of prisoner abuse and extralegal activities, is the one who stood by when such practices were going down in the past, or who listened to briefings about them and did nothing? It seems to me that Obama has some political capital now and, in Bush parlance, he can afford to spend a little. Less calibration, and caution, please. I keep thinking of the Cowardly Lion: he already had the courage, he just needed someone to remind him.