Doppelganger 2

Again, on Mr. Obama at the National Defense University. He seemed to define his doppelganger presidency a bit more clearly--at least as a technique if not a philosophy. He spoke against drones as if someone else was launching them, Gitmo as if some other country controlled it. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on the Web site Lawfare: “To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has — but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.”

But his most interesting pronouncement came on his assessment of the War on Terror that someone is waging. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Mr. Obama said in the speech at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.” One could spend all day analyzing this goofy section but the zenith of its goofiness is the implication that war is some sort of affliction, like smoking or fasting or chicken pox, that is subject to natural or philosophical laws. To the contrary, war is an insane agreement involving at least two groups that promises to kill, maim and destroy as many of the enemy's people as possible. The very idea that this is somehow under some civilized and civilizing political or natural law should be offensive to all thinking people. The naive notion that wars "end" by some force other than the destruction of one of the participants should not be publicly uttered by someone in national office.

But this idea has some history, if you will. Historicism, Doppelganger 1 and Reductionism, Doppelganger 2. The  historicist positions claims that there is an inevitable and deterministic pattern to history and, importantly--especially in this context, denies individual responsibility of each one of us to make our own free contributions to the evolution of society. Reductionism is the belief that all phenomena are reducible to smaller components, in Obama's situation groups and economics, which determine behavior, again diminishing the influence and value of the individual and his efforts.

What does the man in the most powerful position in the world think? That the war is in the fourth quarter and someone else controls the clock.