President Obama's inaugural address made him sound like a new man. "We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war," he said. He told us that "a decade of war" is ending under his watch. 

How did Americans hear that pledge? If you've been paying attention to the United States' increasingly dangerous shadow wars, its proxy wars, its drone wars — or "kinetic operations," as some call them — you were likely very surprised and put off to hear the President say that "lasting peace" doesn't "require perpetual war." 

"We see what you are doing, Mr. President," I thought to myself. "How could you say such a thing?" Hearing such a blatant misrepresentation of reality made me feel as if I was a child again, and my parents were telling me what they thought to be a harmless lie.

Are the American people children, afraid of the night?

We've been told that there are only two options when it comes to the (alternatively grave or minor) threat posed by al Qaeda and "associated forces": we can either invade Muslim majority countries and occupy them (as in Iraq and Afghanistan), or we can bomb them occasionally and engage in covert operations (like we do in Pakistan and Yemen, etc.). When the President asserted that a "decade of war" was ending, he most likely meant that he's trying to exit Afghanistan — that the US military occupation of that nation is going to end. 

But he pulled a linguistic trick on the country that should make us all very uncomfortable about how our president perceives those other violent expressions of US military will — and how he perceives us.

What do our drone strikes and other shadowy operations constitute, after all, if not war? Certainly those bombs are not messengers of peace.

Writing for Esquire, Tom Junod warns that calling a permanent state of covert war "peace" will have very dangerous consequences.

Why didn’t the President’s speech reflect [the reality of the shadow wars]? Why did he say that the “decade of war” prompted by Al Qaeda’s attack on America is ending, when by his Administration’s own insistence it is not? The answer is that he did because he could — and that he could because he has cast this war as a war against war, and because his investment in secrecy has yielded an inestimable return. No one expected him to speak about drones in a speech rhetorically haunted by bound wounds and better angels. But no one, certainly, could have expected him to wish our wars away, when American soldiers are still being killed in Afghanistan, and when we are still killing people — and, in the name of war, reserving the right to keep killing people — all over the world.

 

President Obama’s second inaugural was supposed to sound something like Lincoln’s: the speech of a man tired of war, and eager to move the nation beyond its bloody reach. In truth, it was the speech of a man who has perfected a form of war that can be written off as a kind of peace.