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Thursday 24 December 2009

Will Obama reverse the Pentagon’s mission creep? Without the military credentials, the president has been reluctant so far to take on the generals. Indeed, he has capitulated. During his West Point speech on Afghanistan on December 1, “Obama surrendered,” writes Tom Engelhardt. “It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender documents; he wasn’t on the deck of the USS Missouri; he never bowed his head. Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded-in-chief.” As the president reminded us in Oslo, he is a firm believer in the use of violent means to achieve noble ends. Despite his parenthetical invocation of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., the president doesn’t really take nonviolence seriously. Rather than just war doctrine, the president should instead draw inspiration from the peace churches, like Quakerism. John Feffer

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