From Bush Through Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier

Many Democrats, liberals, traditional conservatives, and even some leftists continue to tell themselves that the election of Joe Biden was the first step toward restoring U.S. standing in the world after the damage caused by Donald Trump. And in a variety of ways — many stylistic and some substantive — that perspective has merit. But when it comes to national security policy, the U.S. has been on a steady, hypermilitarized arc for decades. Taken broadly, U.S. policy has been largely consistent on “national security” and “counterterrorism” matters from 9/11 to the present.

The ascent of the charlatan businessman Trump to the presidency in 2016 was a logical — if somewhat on-the-nose — plot twist in the U.S. imperial saga that managed to distill many truths about this nation into a four-year televised and live-tweeted debacle.

The continued media drumbeat that Trump remains the gravest enduring threat to U.S. democracy is fueled by legitimate concerns over Trump’s frantic efforts to use the office of the presidency to overturn the election results, which came to a head with the violent demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. These dangerous actions, taken in concert with ongoing Republican efforts at voter disenfranchisement and the peddling of false conspiracy theories, merit serious concern. The Trumpist movement, especially its members in Congress, poses a clear threat to the democratic process. But even in the face of this threat, the bipartisan imperial consensus was so strong that the Democrats continued to increase Trump’s national security powers throughout his presidency.

This reflexive bipartisan militarism stands in stark opposition to the Democratic Party’s sweeping and fallacious rhetoric that the bad face of the U.S. emerges only when Republicans seize executive power — and that the sole remedy is electing Democrats. Civilian victims of Barack Obama’s drone strikes might have another view. Before Trump, according to Democratic doctrine, the evils of U.S. policy originated with George W. Bush and his “co-president” Dick Cheney. Yet under both Trump and Bush, the rhetoric from many Democrats was pathologically disconnected from their support for ever-expanding militarist and surveillance policies.

The Democratic party, in its self-tailored version of history, has always been a steadfast force of resistance against GOP excesses and abuses. The Democrats appear to see no contradiction between fighting Republican attacks on voting rights and their own enthusiastic embrace of empire in foreign policy. Without support from the leadership of the Democratic Party — and votes from rank-and-file congressional Democrats — many of the worst national security policies of the past two decades would have been impossible to implement or would have required enormous political battles or an even greater, and abusive, use of executive power to accomplish.

If the Democratic Party offered a true resistance to the GOP, the history of the post-9/11 world would be very different. Instead of California Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee standing as the lone vote in the entire Congress against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force — the “blank check” for global war — days after September 11, 2001, we would have seen the majority of Democrats join her in a chorus of opposition and restraint. Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin, would not have been the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. The legislative authorities for the Iraq War would have been thwarted without the support of a majority of Democratic senators: 29 voted in its favor, including the current president. Without that backing, the Bush-Cheney administration would have had to openly and publicly own its maniacal belief that when it comes to “national security” policy, the executive branch can and should function as a de facto dictatorship.

While a vocal minority of Democrats spent much of the two terms of the Bush administration fighting against the Iraq War and the grave human rights abuses being committed by the CIA and military, the leadership of the party consistently abetted the Bush-Cheney agenda. When it mattered most, the party failed to offer more than meager protests. After the Democrats gained a House majority in the 2006 midterm elections, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear there would be no accountability at the highest levels of power. “I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table,” Pelosi asserted. “We pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”

There is an understandable tendency to view the past 20 years of U.S. militarism as a defining era unto itself. And, in some crucial ways, the full spectrum of U.S. responses to the September 11 attacks did alter the world and, with it, the U.S. way of war. But at their core, the most consequential actions emanating from Washington, D.C., after 9/11 were already in motion. The Bush administration came to power with an eye toward regime change in Iraq. But it did so emboldened by the bipartisan vote during Bill Clinton’s tenure that made regime change official U.S. policy, backed up by constant bombings of Iraq throughout Clinton’s two terms. Even Bernie Sanders, then a House representative, supported that bill, which was largely the work of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century. Under Clinton, the U.S. was already moving toward a system of remote lethal strikes and small wars, though it was much more reliant on legacy systems like cruise missiles rather than the now ubiquitous armed drones. The precursor of the Patriot Act was passed with significant support from both parties, with Biden serving as one of its lead architects, a fact he regularly and proudly cited. The U.S. was already operating a well-oiled economic warfare machine with its use of crippling sanctions in an effort to overthrow governments or punish populations into submission.

In its malignant genius, the Bush-Cheney administration — stacked with career hawks who knew how to work the levers of power — saw opportunity in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They saw the value of tapping into the rage, shock, and, most importantly, fear that gripped the nation in the aftermath of the terror attacks to accelerate the implementation of their agenda. The Democratic Party willingly folded itself into the Bush administration’s aspirations and bestowed upon it sweeping war and surveillance powers. The most significant milestones of the past two decades lie not with the victories of extroverted villainous Republicans like Bush or Trump, but in the synergy that exists among the various political factions between U.S. elections.

Targeted Killings

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, the party had an opportunity to showcase what an antidote to Bush-Cheney policymaking would look like. This prospect was a major part of the success of the Obama campaigns against both Hillary Clinton, an Iraq War supporter, and John McCain, a notorious militarist. Instead, Obama expanded some of the most dangerous aspects of the Bush-Cheney war apparatus while shielding the CIA, military leaders, and the entire Bush administration from any accountability. Obama surged troops in Afghanistan and empowered both the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command to engage in expanded global “targeted killing” operations. He embraced the widespread use of covert operations, ratcheted up drone strikes in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, initiated air wars in Somalia and Yemen that endure to this day, and waged a disastrous regime change war in Libya.

Obama used his credibility among the base of the Democratic Party in an effort to normalize assassination as an acceptable, if not preferable, tool of U.S. policy. Obama relied so heavily on drone strikes that they became a policy unto themselves, and he publicly asserted the right of the U.S. president to assassinate American citizens by means of “targeted killing,” based on the vague notion that they might someday threaten national security or even U.S. interests. While the U.S. government has long engaged in covert assassinations, Obama transformed and legitimized such operations with his intricate attempts to rebrand the practice and to publicly argue in favor of its legality and morality.

Obama’s Justice Department defended former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others against charges of war crimes in civil litigation and refused to hold the CIA accountable for its widespread use of torture and extraordinary rendition. Obama simultaneously prosecuted whistleblowers with a vengeance using a warped interpretation of the 1917 Espionage Act. His CIA director, John Brennan, lied about the agency spying on U.S. Senate torture investigators, and his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath when testifying about mass surveillance and the bulk collection of communications among U.S. citizens.

By the time Obama prepared to leave office, his administration had built up what amounted to a secret parallel judicial system to enforce the long-standing U.S. global killing regime. During Obama’s second term, his administration cobbled together a ramshackle set of guidelines for targeted killings that he said he hoped would bring legal structure, oversight, and transparency to his signature military tactic. But these guidelines had…