by JEFFERY ST. CLAIR
United States predator drone; sometimes used in targeted killings PHOTO/Wikipedia
Picture the circumstances. You’re evaporating politically, less and less remains of you every week. The nation itself is quivering with anxiety, freaking out over each new virus or decapitation posted on Instagram. The economy, six years after the crash, continues to be catatonic: half the GDP generated by liquidation sales, the other half driven by enterprises that require HazMat suits. There’s scant hope of finding an exit from that gnawing vortex, not with the gang running the Hill these days.
Some of your closest allies have jumped ship, and shanked you in the back on the way out the door with bitchy tell-all memoirs that excoriate you for not heeding their advice. The rest of the inner circle seems to have lost faith: faith in the office, faith that anything will get better, faith in you.
Yes, put yourself in Obama’s chair, right there in the cockpit of the Oval Office, under these tremulous circumstances. What would you do when you’re flatlining and there’s no quick fix, no patch, no system upgrade that will reboot the program? What is to be done? You unlock that secret drawer and pull out the old playbook, the binding worn by numerous desperate hands before your own, you pencil in some innovations, a few of your signature moves and then let rip by declaring a new war.
Well, not exactly “declaring” war. That would be problematic. Hmm. There is that sweeping Authorization for Use of Military Force cooked up by Bush’s crack team of lawyers back in 2001, the one that sanctioned unilateral war across the Middle East from Afghanistan to Somalia to Iraq. Of course, you once denounced that very document as “constitutional over-reach” but who will hold those naïve opinions against you now?
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