Rothkopf seems disgusted with Obama

David Rothkopf, the editor of "Foreign Policy", really lambastes Obama. While his most recent article,"From Messiah to Mediocrity", was triggered by Obama's NSA speech on Friday, he begins by calling Obama 'a middle of the pack president likely to fit in somewhere between Rutherford B. Hayes and Martin Van Buren'. He laments, when the 'country needed the constitutional scholar who was bold enough to speak truth to power -- the man who many of us thought we were electing in 2008 and then again in 2012 -- we instead got the wobbly, vague, "trust me" of a run-of-the-mill pol'.

Rothkopf thought the speech was another typical Obama speech: "Don't worry, I'm a good guy, I'll make sure that all the big decisions that get made will be OK." However, he feels that Obama needs to be a strong leader and 'hew to principle and the long-term interests of the people and make bold and decisive choices when necessary, even if those choices open him up to political attack'.

Here are some more of what I see as trenchant observations by Rothkopf on our weak president:

In this instance, a president who was elected to undo the errors of his predecessor in overreacting to the attacks of 9/11 by launching three massive wars -- one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, and one against terrorists worldwide -- has not only bungled the execution of each such desired reversal, he has produced a world in which our enemies and the chaos that serves them are now regaining strength. And where he should have sought to undo the mentality that led to the creation of those misguided and mishandled wars -- the fear-driven overstatement of the risks we face -- he not only failed, he has succumbed. 

He oversaw and accepted the expansion of the NSA's programs based on the logic that because a single bad actor could duplicate the devastation of 9/11, everyone everywhere effectively became a potential threat. We went from a bi-polar world in which we had one primary enemy, into not a unipolar world but into an apolar one in which our potential adversaries numbered in the thousands or even millions. Only such an analysis could warrant the shift of our intelligence community from its targeted approaches of the Cold War to the more wholesale, scattershot, limit-lite approaches of today.

He should have said that our focus ought to be not on what we fear but on what we value, on preserving the freedoms our forefathers fought to protect rather than compromising them in the hopes of protecting us against that which we cannot expect to ever eradicate. The way to fight terrorists is to focus on resilience and systematic, targeted efforts to go after known bad actors. Not with misguided invasions of sovereign powers nor with misguided violations of sovereign or individual rights worldwide.

That is not to say we won't spy or shouldn't. We must and will. Rather it is to recognize that the limits we place on programs like the surveillance efforts of the NSA are as important to protecting us from future threats as are the programs themselves.