He has few constraints (except those he\u2019s internalized).\u00a0 No one can stop him or countermand his orders.\u00a0 He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the \u201clegality\u201d of his actions.\u00a0 And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth.<\/p>\n
He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel.\u00a0 You know, the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works.<\/p>\n
As it happens, though, he\u2019s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids.<\/p>\n
How could this be?<\/p>\n
Crash-and-Burn Dreams and One That Came to Be<\/strong><\/p>\n Sometimes to understand where you are, you need to ransack the past.\u00a0 In this case, to grasp just how this country\u2019s first African-American-constitutional-law-professor-liberal Oval Office holder became the most imperial of all recent imperial presidents, it\u2019s necessary to look back to the early years of George W. Bush\u2019s presidency.\u00a0 Who today even remembers that time, when it was common to speak of the U.S. as the globe\u2019s \u201csole superpower\u201d or even \u201chyperpower,\u201d the only \u201csheriff\u201d on planet Earth, and the neocons were boasting of an empire-to-come greater than the British and Roman ones rolled together?<\/p>\n In those first high-flying years after 9\/11, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their top officials held three dreams of power and dominance that they planned to make reality.\u00a0 The first was to loose the U.S. military — a force they fervently believed<\/a> capable of bringing anybody or any state to heel — on the Greater Middle East.\u00a0 With it in the lead, they aimed to create a generations-long Pax Americana<\/em> in the region.<\/p>\n The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to be only the initial \u201ccakewalk\u201d in a series of a shock-and-awe operations in which Washington would unilaterally rearrange the oil heartlands of the planet, toppling or cowing hostile regimes like the Syrians and the Iranians. \u00a0(A neocon quip<\/a> caught the spirit of that moment: \u201cEveryone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.\u201d)\u00a0 This, in turn, would position the U.S. to control the planet in a historically unique way, and so prevent the rise of any other great power or bloc of nations resistant to American desires.<\/p>\n Their second dream, linked at the hip to the first, was to create a generations-long Pax Republicana<\/em> here at home. (\u201cEveryone wants to go to Kansas, but real men want to go to New York and LA.\u201d)\u00a0 In that dream, the Democratic Party, like the Iraqis or the Iranians, would be brought to heel, a new Republican majority funded by corporate America would rule the roost, and above it all would be perched a \u201cunitary executive<\/a>,\u201d a president freed of domestic constraints and capable — by fiat, the signing statement<\/a>, or simply expanded powers — of doing just about anything he wanted.<\/p>\n Though less than a decade has passed, both of those dreams already feel like ancient history.\u00a0 Both crashed and burned, leaving behind a Democrat in the White House, an Iraq without an American military garrison, and a still-un-regime-changed Iran.\u00a0 With the arrival on Bush\u2019s watch of a global economic meltdown, those too-big-not-to-fail dreams were relabeled disasters, fed down the memory hole, and are today largely forgotten.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy, then, to forget that the Bush era wasn\u2019t all crash-and-burn, that the third of their hubristic fantasies proved a remarkable, if barely noticed, success.\u00a0 Because that success never fully registered amid successive disasters and defeats, it\u2019s been difficult for Americans to grasp the \u201cimperial\u201d part of the Obama presidency.<\/p>\n Remember that Cheney and his cohorts took power in 2001 convinced that, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, American presidents had been placed in \u201cchains.\u201d\u00a0 As soon as 9\/11 hit, they began, as they put it<\/a>, to \u201ctake the gloves off.\u201d\u00a0 Their deepest urge was to use \u201cnational security\u201d to free George W. Bush and his Pax Americana<\/em> successors of any constraints.<\/p>\n From this urge flowed the decision to launch a \u201cGlobal War on Terror\u201d — that is, a \u201cwartime\u201d with no possible end that would leave a commander-in-chief president in the White House till hell froze over.\u00a0 The construction of Guantanamo and the creation of \u201cblack sites<\/a>\u201d from Poland<\/a> to Thailand<\/a>, the president\u2019s own private offshore prison system, followed naturally, as did the creation of his own privately sanctioned form of (in)justice and punishment, a torture regime<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the same time, they began expanding the realm of presidentially ordered \u201ccovert\u201d military operations (most of which were, in the end, well publicized) — from drone wars to the deployment of special operations forces.\u00a0 These were signposts indicating the power of an unchained president to act without constraint abroad.\u00a0 Similarly, at home, the Bush administration began expanding what would once<\/a> have been illegal surveillance <\/a>of citizens and other forms of presidentially inspired overreach.\u00a0 They began, in other words, treating the U.S. as if it were part of an alien planet, as if it were, in some sense, a foreign country and they the occupying power.<\/p>\n With a cowed Congress and a fearful, distracted populace, they undoubtedly were free to do far more.\u00a0 There were few enough checks and balances left to constrain a war president and his top officials.\u00a0 It turned out, in fact, that the only real checks and balances they felt were internalized ones, or ones that came from within the national security state itself, and yet those evidently did limit what they felt was possible.<\/p>\n The Obama Conundrum<\/strong><\/p>\n This, then, was what Barack Obama inherited on entering the Oval Office: an expanding, but not yet fully expansive, commander-in-chief presidency, which, in retrospect, seemed to fit him like a… glove.\u00a0 Of course, he also inherited the Bush administration\u2019s domestic failures and those in the Greater Middle East, and they overshadowed what he\u2019s done with that commander-in-chief presidency.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that, with President Truman\u2019s decision to go to war in Korea in 1950, Congress\u2019s constitutional right to declare war (rather than rubberstamp a presidential announcement of the same) went by the boards.\u00a0 So there\u2019s a distinct backstory to our present imperial presidency.\u00a0 Still, in our era, presidential war-making has become something like a 24\/7 activity.<\/p>\n Once upon a time, American presidents didn\u2019t consider micro-managing a permanent war state as a central part of their job description, nor did they focus so unrelentingly on the U.S. military and the doings of the national security state. Today, the president\u2019s word is death just about anywhere on the planet and he exercises that power with remarkable frequency.\u00a0 He appears<\/a> in front of \u201cthe troops\u201d increasingly often and his wife has made their wellbeing part of<\/a> her job description.\u00a0 He has at his command expanded \u201ccovert\u201d powers, including his own private armies: a more militarized CIA and growing hordes of special operations forces, 60,000<\/a> of them, who essentially make up a \u201ccovert\u201d military inside the U.S. military.<\/p>\n In effect, he also has his own private intelligence outfits, including most recently a newly formed Defense Clandestine Service at the Pentagon focused on non-war zone intelligence operations (especially, so the reports go<\/a>, against China and Iran).\u00a0 Finally, he has what is essentially his own expanding<\/a> private (robotic) air force: drones.<\/p>\n He can send his drone assassins and special ops troops just about anywhere to kill just about anyone he thinks should die, national sovereignty be damned<\/a>.\u00a0 He firmly established his \u201cright\u201d to do this by going after the worst of the worst, killing<\/a> Osama bin Laden in Pakistan with special operations forces and an American citizen and jihadi<\/em>, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen with a drone<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the moment, the president is in the process of widening his around-the-clock \u201ccovert\u201d air campaigns.\u00a0 Almost unnoted in the U.S., for instance, American drones recently carried out a strike<\/a> in the Philippines killing 15 and the Air Force has since announced a plan to boost its drones there by 30%.\u00a0 At the same time, in Yemen, as previously in the Pakistani borderlands<\/a>, the president has just given<\/a> the CIA and the U.S. Joint Operations Command the authority to launch drone strikes not just against identified \u201chigh-value\u201d al-Qaeda \u201ctargets,\u201d but against general \u201cpatterns of suspicious behavior<\/a>.\u201d \u00a0So expect an escalating<\/a> drone war there not against known individuals, but against groups of suspected evildoers (and as in all such cases, innocent civilians as well).<\/p>\n This is another example of something that would be forbidden at home, but is now a tool of unchecked presidential power elsewhere in the world: profiling.<\/p>\n As with Bush junior, the only thing that constrains the president and his team, it seems, is some set of internalized checks and balances.\u00a0 That\u2019s undoubtedly why, before he ordered the successful drone assassination of Awlaki, lawyers from the Pentagon, State Department, National Security Council, intelligence agencies, and the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel held meetings to produce<\/a> a 50-page memorandum providing a \u201clegal\u201d basis for the president to order the assassination of a U.S. citizen, a document, mind you, that will never be released to the public.<\/p>\n In truth, at this point the president could clearly have ordered those deaths without such a document.\u00a0 Think of it as the presidential equivalent of a guilty conscience, but count on this: when those drones start taking out \u201cbehaviors\u201d in Yemen and elsewhere, there will be no stream of 50-page memorandums generated to cover the decisions. That\u2019s because as you proceed down such a path, as your acts become ever more the way of your world, your need to justify them (to yourself, if no one else) lessens.<\/p>\n That path, already widening into a road, may, someday, become the killing equivalent of an autobahn<\/em>.\u00a0 In that case, making such decisions will be ever easier for an imperial president as American society grows yet more detached<\/a> from the wars fought and operations launched in its name.\u00a0 In terms of the president\u2019s power to kill by decree, whether Obama gets his second term or Mitt Romney steps into the Oval Office, the reach of the commander-in-chief presidency and the \u201ccovert\u201d campaigns, so secret they can\u2019t even be acknowledged<\/a> in a court of law, so public they can be boasted<\/a> about, will only increase.<\/p>\n This is a dangerous development, which leaves us in the grip — for now — of what might be called the Obama conundrum.\u00a0 At home, on issues of domestic importance, Obama is a hamstrung, hogtied president, strikingly checked and balanced.\u00a0 Since the passage of his embattled healthcare bill, he has, in a sense, been in chains, able to accomplish next to nothing of his domestic program.\u00a0 Even when trying to exercise the unilateral powers<\/a> that have increasingly been invested in presidents, what he can do on his own has proven exceedingly limited, a series of tiny gestures<\/a> aimed at the largest of problems. And were Mitt Romney to be elected, given congressional realities, this would be unlikely to change in the next four years.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the power of the president as commander-in-chief has never been greater.\u00a0 If Obama is the president of next to nothing on the domestic policy front (but fundraising<\/a> for his second term), he has the powers previously associated<\/a> with the gods when it comes to war-making abroad.\u00a0 There, he is the purveyor of life and death.\u00a0 At home, he is a hamstrung weakling, at war he is — to use a term that has largely disappeared since the 1970s — an imperial president.<\/p>\n Such contradictions call for resolution and that should worry us all.<\/p>\n ____________________________<\/p>\n Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a> and the author of<\/em> The American Way of War: How Bush\u2019s Wars Became Obama\u2019s<\/a> as well as<\/em> The End of Victory Culture<\/a>, runs the Nation Institute’s <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/a>. His latest book is<\/em> The United States of Fear<\/a> (Haymarket Books).<\/em><\/p>\n