http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...mment-23878967
"For me, and those in my chain of command, those [civilian] deaths will haunt us as long as we live."
Throughout his presidency Obama has presented a variant reading of Tony Blair's spiritual pantomime. He speaks in tones unmistakably liturgical, from an all but visible pulpit, in terms homiletic and reassuring. Blair's public strategy of masochistic self-sacrifice in 2003- remember those ghastly, intimate appearances in tv studios before disbelieving, slow-clapping audiences?- has been tweaked by Obama's handlers in a novel way. Where the point of Blair's humiliation was that it proved his innocence, President Obama's performance as Agoniser-in-Chief relies on an even more repulsive sleight of hand. In representing himself as subject to a unique species of moral disquiet, even suffering, Obama pronounces on himself a sort of blessing that immunises him from ordinary criticism. In effect, he is claiming that the man with the most exemplary and unassailable conscience is the one who carries the greatest burden of guilt. And it is this quasi-Christian spectacle of the President wrestling with himself under his own personal tree of life, while he solemnly commits the most dreadful war crimes, that surpasses anything offered by the Bush Gang or indeed, Tony himself. We are constantly badgered into acknowledging that the President is so deeply aware of the contorted meaning of his actions, so haunted in that Lincolnesque manner, that he becomes innocent of those very deeds through the full knowledge of them. If I were religious, I'd call it blasphemy. Since I know too little of Christian theology (St Augustine indeed), I'll leave that field to others. But rather than kinship with the interior struggles of saints, Obama's strategy in this speech and throughout his presidency strikes me as having more than a little in common with that of Albert Speer, whose own moral pain- indeed, his profound guilt- became the centerpiece of his public rehabilitation. His guilt had absolved him of all that he had done.