Stephen Holmes reviews ‘The CIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth’ by Mark Mazzetti · LRB 18 July 2013
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/stephen-holmes/whats-in-it-for-obama
In his 23 May speech, speaking about the war America launched in the wake of 9/11, [Obama] said: ‘this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.’ What he apparently meant to say was that he has found a way for this war to continue without penetrating the consciousness of US citizens. That is apparently what American democracy demands. The instrument that has allowed him to narrow the fight guarantees that the fight will go on. Obama came into office promising to restrict and reconfigure the country’s counterterrorism efforts, to bring them back within the rule of law. Instead, he too is fighting fire with fire. He continues to play according to bin Laden’s archaic playbook, perpetuating an endless post-9/11 revenge cycle, tit for tat.
... the drone, whatever its moral superiority to land armies and heavy weaponry, has replaced Guantánamo as the incendiary symbol of America’s indecent callousness towards the world’s Muslims. As Bush was the Guantánamo president, so Obama is the drone president. This switch, whatever Obama hoped, represents a worsening not an improvement of America’s image in the world.
Once Obama concluded that this war will never end, he presumably drew the sensible inference that traditional law-of-war detention is wholly inapplicable to the unconventional conflict in which the US is now engaged. That is when he made his fateful choice: the moment when he turned to the only form of incapacitation appropriate to a war without end. In so doing, he has bequeathed to us not a war that will be easier to contain, but one that is borderless and self-sustaining and that shows not a single discernible sign of burning itself out.