Democracy Now! producer and occasional co-host Anjali Kamat has written a great piece for Samar 35, unpacking the significance of President Obama's December 1, 2009 war escalation speech at West Point:
"If there is one unmistakable difference between Bush's wars and Obama's wars it boils down to this: we now have a president who can almost perfectly pronounce the names of the cities and villages US troops will occupy and bomb. We just can't call it occupation. It's "enlightened self-interest" as Obama emphasized during that same Nobel speech...So as NATO and the Afghan army prepare to attack the Taliban-controlled town of Marja this February, perhaps the area's 80,000 residents should take heart that they are fleeing a smart and principled war and not a dumb one based on outright deception. And the families of 123 Pakistani civilians killed by 12 US drone attacks this January should be relieved that they lost their loved ones to a rational and carefully thought-out (but still secret) war and not a rash one based on neoconservative fervor. But such differences are suddenly irrelevant when you're on the receiving end of the bombs...If we go further back in history Obama begins to sound more and more like every US president before him trying to justify American imperial overreach, cloaking it in the seductive language of liberation. And not very different from those old colonial powers Americans try so hard to distinguish themselves from...Domination masquerading as liberation is an old propaganda tactic of empires but it rarely works among the populations subjugated by this type of emancipation." [Samar 35]