It is interesting that it takes a movie to spark this debate. Some analysis on Jeh Johnson's recent comments and the War on Terrorism by the author of Kill or Capture: the War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency
V/R
Dave
Dave
Will Obama End the War on Terror?
Dec 17, 2012 12:00 AM EST
Zero Dark Thirty spotlights America’s finest hour in the battle against al Qaeda. But can Obama finish the forever war? The debate over drones—and getting out alive.
In the final scene of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s heart-stopping thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Maya, a CIA operative and the movie’s heroine, is strapped into a seat on a military transport plane staring into the middle distance, looking depleted. The film’s dramatic arc follows Maya’s near-messianic quest to take out “UBL.” Intense and headstrong, she battles the weary fatalism of her bosses, suppresses all moral doubt about the use of torture to extract leads, and sticks to her theory of the case with feverish conviction. The movie’s harrowing, climactic kill operation is Maya’s vindication. But then, having identified bin Laden’s body in a hangar at Bagram Air Base, she finds herself all alone in a cavernous cargo hold, a thousand-yard stare on her face. When a cheerful crew member tries to engage her, she looks away. “Where do you want to go?” he asks.
"Ultimately we’re not going to be able to kill or capture our way out of this fight," says one Special Ops commander. (Benjamin Lowy / Edit by Getty Images)
Maya never answers—and the audience is left wondering whether her struggle is over. Has she exorcised her demons? Can she free herself from the grip of the “forever war”? Those questions, in a way, are as much about America as they are about Maya. Zero Dark Thirty, which opens in theaters this week, has already stirred controversy by reigniting a debate about the efficacy and ethics of torture. But nearly a decade after the last detainee was waterboarded by the CIA, the more relevant question raised by the film may be: when and how will the war on terror finally draw to a close?
It’s a question that President Obama has quietly discussed with his closest advisers. He has raised the issue publicly only in the vaguest terms: when he said, to rousing cheers on election night, that “a decade of war is ending,” it sounded more like a reference to Afghanistan and Iraq than a statement about the war on terror as a whole. Yet behind the scenes Obama has led a persistent internal conversation about whether America should remain engaged in a permanent, ever-expanding state of war, one that has pushed the limits of the law, stretched dwindling budgets, and at times strained relations with our allies. “This has always been a concern of the president’s,” says a former military adviser to Obama. “He’s uncomfortable with the idea of war without end.”
It is still considered politically treacherous for anyone, especially Democrats, to question whether war is the right framework for fighting terrorism. But just as the intelligence and military communities were criticized 12 years ago for having had too much of a “pre-9/11 mentality,” some in the administration have now begun to gingerly ask whether we today have too much of a post-9/11 mentality. Or, as one adviser to Obama recently put it to me, “Is it time to start winding down the state of emergency?”
(Continued at the link below)
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