President Obama’s core war strategy depends on massive intelligence capabilities that were undreamed of twenty years ago. It depends on the substitution of drones for troops. PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an avoidable accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy: public peace and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war, he must intensify the secret struggle.Here’s the big problem: to the degree that the strategy works, and the public begins to feel safe and the war atmosphere fades, the intelligence work and the drone strikes that the strategy requires look less and less justifiable. After all, the President’s message is that the threat is under control and the terrorists are on the run. Why then is the NSA tapping every phone and reading every email in the country?As the gap grows between the public peace and the secret war, leaks about the war become more likely and more damaging. Those who service the secret war begin to wonder if what they are doing is right; they wonder if somebody shouldn’t blow the whistle on what begins to look like a massive deception of the public. And the more the administration has been putting out the ‘peace in our time’ vibe to the media, the more explosive is the news that in secret it is ramping up some of the most controversial aspects of W’s war policy to levels Dick Cheney could only dream about.
Obama’s strategy can only work if the American people are as stupid as he thinks they are. He’s aided in this by the “guilty white Liberal” syndrome that infects and dominates the MSM, academia and the media. These people may not be that stupid but they are incapable of overcoming their prejudice and will either look the other way or seek to cover for him.
Conducting secret wars in faraway places with strange sounding names is hard enough, to do it at home by entering everyone’s home, everyone’s secrets, is impossible. The chickens are coming home to roost.
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