Chomsky has a piece out in The Nation on Obama, the terror memos, and historical amnesia.
For many of us here, the torture during the Bush years was more of the same: some might point to the history of the national security state, others to the treatment of indigenous populations, others still to chattel slavery, and still others to the imperialism that marked and drove US overseas investment in Asia and Latin America over the last century and a half. To those that see the Bush years as a distinct reversal of America's role in the world, Chomsky has this to say:
Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for." To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history.
Chomsky then goes on to catalogue American abuses, at home and elsewhere: the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the settling of the American West, etc. And he points out the hypocrisy of both the "saltwater fallacy" and the idea of "American Exceptionalism." His point is a simple one: it is incredibly misleading to suggest that America has somehow "lost its way" in the "War on Terror." To suggest this, as Krugman and others do, is a form of historical amnesia.
Yet maybe things did change a little under Bush:
None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so."
Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. "His is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."
So under Obama things may well return to a state of normalcy: a glorious little war here, a glorious little war there, support for corrupt client regimes, and the outsourcing of torture. And of course it will all be funded through the issuance of new debt, a transfer of wealth from the public trough to the already super wealthy, with the future debt obligations used to defeat hard fought for social wages and programs.
But it is not as if Bush's "War on Terror" was something new, as Chomsky points out:
It should also be recalled that Bush did not declare the "war on terror," he re-declared it. Twenty years earlier, President Reagan's administration came into office declaring that a centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war on terror, "the plague of the modern age" and "a return to barbarism in our time"--to sample the fevered rhetoric of the day.
That first US war on terror has also been deleted from historical consciousness, because the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the canon: hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the ruined countries of Central America and many more elsewhere, among them an estimated 1.5 million dead in the terrorist wars sponsored in neighboring countries by Reagan's favored ally, apartheid South Africa, which had to defend itself from Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," as Washington determined in 1988.
And where is Obama in all of this?
Look forward, not back.
Maybe Obama is playing chess and Chomsky is playing checkers. Maybe Obama is playing ishtohbohl and Chomky is playing chunky.
Who knows. It could be the case that US foreign and domestic policies are not best understood through gaming metaphors.
What we can agree on is that those who tortured should be prosecuted, that those who ordered torture should be prosecuted, and that institutions that build torture paradigms should be dismantled.