Obama legitimized and expanded the war on terror, not reversed it

Evidence

The securitization of Islam and the racialization of Muslims initiated by the Bush administration were strengthened during the Obama era. The failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, had called the credibility of the Bush administration into question. Both on the international and domestic front, Obama launched a “smarter” war on terror. Here I lay out a few ways in which the Obama administration built on and deepened the policies developed by Bush, but also how it replaced programs that had come under fire. Just as with the global war on terror where Obama initiated a new rhetorical posture, the domestic war on terror also acquired a more liberal veneer. As journalist Jeremy Scahill notes in his book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, one of the most comprehensive journalistic accounts of the expansion of empire after 9/11, “the war on terror, launched under a Republican administration, was ultimately legitimized and expanded by a popular Democratic president.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 612

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Challenges liberal-progressive conventional wisdom that Obama represented a break from Bush-era security policy; connects to reader’s interest in how systems persist across rhetorical regime changes.
• SEED: The ‘liberal veneer’ thesis — that cosmetic rhetorical shifts legitimize rather than soften repressive policy — is a strong analytical frame worth an essay on policy continuity across party lines.

Related

• A popular Democratic president legitimized and expanded the Republican war on terror. (similarity 0.93)
• Failed Iraq and Afghan wars drove Obama toward a rebranded smarter war on terror (similarity 0.83)
• Obama’s liberal-rhetoric foreign policy continued Bush-era imperial military operations. (similarity 0.83)
• Obama’s presidency mutated and advanced rather than ended the war on terror (similarity 0.83)
• Obama’s realist framing masked a continuation of Bush-era imperial warfare (similarity 0.82)
• Obama continued and expanded Bush’s imperial wars despite softer rhetoric (similarity 0.81)
• Bush to Obama was a rhetorical shift masking unchanged imperial fundamentals. (similarity 0.81)
• Obama continued the War on Terror through rhetorical seduction. (similarity 0.80)
• Islamophobia persisted equally under Obama and Bush administrations. (similarity 0.80)
• Anti-Muslim racialization is bipartisan and flourished under the Obama administration (similarity 0.80)
• Bush and Clinton administrations resisted the neocon anti-Islamic-terrorism agenda (similarity 0.80)
• Obama revived the al-Qaeda threat despite its near-extinction to salvage failing counterinsurgency (similarity 0.80)
• Obama’s multilateral realism was a continuity of Bush-era imperial strategy (similarity 0.79)
• Obama’s Cairo speech repackaged rather than abandoned the imperial frame (similarity 0.79)
• Reagan-era war on terror did not persist through Bush and Clinton (similarity 0.79)