Obama Is Not, And Never Was, Anti-War

Greenwald rounds-up those on the left and the right who enjoyed Obama's Nobel speech. Greenwald is predictably upset by this consensus, but Obama's foreign policy positions should have been clear to anyone playing attention during the campaign. Greenwald:

Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices.  Just as George Bush's Christian-based moralizing let conservatives feel good about America regardless of what it does, Obama's complex and elegiac rhetoric lets many liberals do the same.  To red state Republicans, war and its accompanying instruments (secrecy, executive power, indefinite detention) felt so good and right when justified by swaggering, unapologetic toughness and divinely-mandated purpose; to blue state Democrats, all of that feels just as good when justified by academic meditations on "just war" doctrine and when accompanied by poetic expressions of sorrow and reluctance.  When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday:  a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world.

Some of us have long understood Obama's defense of war from the left. And why it might not be as tragic as Greenwald implies.