Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation

John Brennan. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster.)

Were you a terrorist or member of Al Qaeda, you wouldn’t want to meet John Brennan in a dark alley. He’s an Irish tough guy, and he doesn’t apologize for wanting to obliterate Al Qaeda. For four years, as Obama’s top adviser on counterterrorism, that’s been his job. And in that job, he’s used drones freely to strike both leaders and members of Al Qaeda and related groups, including the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Often, innocents have died.

It’s not going well in Iraq.

Violence in Iraq might not yet be at Syria-type levels, where a full-scale civil war has left as many as 60,000 dead since 2011, but the latest reports from Baghdad say that 4,471 civilians died in Iraq in 2012. That’s up from 4.059 in 2011—and it looks like things will be getting a lot worse in 2013.

Heckuva success, W!

It’s a sad commentary on both Barack Obama and the state of Democratic Party politics and its national security wing that the president, once again, is considering naming another Republican as secretary of defense. You’ll recall that in 2009, Obama let Robert Gates, the Republican who served George W. Bush, stay on at the Department of Defense. Not that Gates was a neocon—no, far from it. But he was certainly drawn from the center-hawkish part of the American national security establishment, whose Democratic ranks include such execrable luminaries as Sam Nunn and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

This time, it’s Chuck Hagel, a moderate Republican—who, ’tis true, might be flirting with becoming a Democrat, since he seems to think that the GOP has moved so far right that he can’t even see its outer edges from Nebraska, his home state. It would be nice if Obama could find a liberal Democrat to run the Pentagon, someone who’d oversee the massive cuts in military outlays that are long past due, and who’d shut down the infatuation with the Special Forces, the drones and the “pivot” to the Pacific and East Asia.

But no, it’s Hagel, it appears—someone whose decided tilt against Israel and its omnipresent allies in the Israel lobby (or, as Hagel calls it, the “Jewish lobby”) is a strong point in his favor, especially if the United States is to avoid going to war against Iran in Obama’s second term.

Just in case you were wondering if President Barack Obama is any different from, say, “President Mitt Romney” or some hypothetical “President Neocon,” the answer is: Yes. Proof: Syria.

Just take a glimpse at the hysteria of the neoconservatives about what ought to be done in Syria.

To be sure, at the outset there’s this disclaimer: since the start of the Syrian uprising, I’ve been extremely critical of Obama’s actions. When the protests against President Assad were still relatively peaceful and only limited government repression was reported, and when moderate, establishment-leaning (and non-Islamist) opposition figures were beginning to gather steam, Obama jumped the gun and called for Assad’s ouster. That was stupid enough. Since then, though, he’s placated Assad’s external enemies—among them Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who’ve backed Islamism from Tunisia to Afghanistan, and of course Israel—by encouraging, allowing and facilitating the supply of increasingly deadly weapons to the rebels. Some in the Obama administration seem enchanted by the idea that the fall of Assad will deal a huge blow to Iran, even though the United States ought to be fearful of a Sunni-Shiite war in the region that will spark renewed civil war in Iraq and Lebanon. And, of course, OP has seemed unwilling to truly engage Russia (and Iran) in search of a transition in Damascus.