As a poll shows Barack Obama's approval figures falling, is he a prisoner of the U.S. military?

Hailed when he was elected 11 months ago as America's most exciting new President for decades, Barack Obama's approval figures have dropped like a stone.
Gallup recorded an average daily approval rating of 53 per cent for Obama for the third quarter of the year, down from 62 per cent in April.
His current approval rating - hovering just above the level that would make re- election in 2012 an uphill struggle - is close to the bottom for a newly-elected President.
He entered the White House with a soaring 78 per cent approval rating. What happened? Vilified by Right-wingers for trying to reform America's health system - in which 40 per cent of the population do not have insurance cover - he disappoints his own supporters by dithering over what to do about the two wars started by George W. Bush, Iraq and Afghanistan.
He said he'd close Guantanamo Bay torture camp, but it's still open. Nor has he reversed any of Bush's abuses of power, such as 'extraordinary rendition' and military tribunals.
He won't release 92 documents describing CIA 'enhanced interrogations' - the agency destroyed the videos - or release White House logs which list how many times energy conglomerate executives came to the Bush White House to lobby for their interests.
The distinguished American historian Gary Wills suggests that Obama is an Oval Office prisoner of the 'National Security State' - ie, he's told by defence officials what he can and cannot do.
'He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command,' says Professor Wills.
Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power.'
'Obama's staff have been captured by the very people who were the drivers of the interrogation process in the first place,' an ex-CIA official told the Washington Post.
An OBAMA White house official says in The New Yorker: 'It's like the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers' - a reference to the classic 1956 horror film in which residents of a small California town are replaced by pods who kill and dispose of their victims.
President Dwight Eisenhower warned when he left the White House in 1961 that there was a danger America would be controlled by what he called 'the military-industrial complex'.
Professor Wills says: 'The permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the Cold War and the "war on terror" - all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to efforts at dismantling it.
'Sixty-eight years of war emergency powers (1941 - 2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order. Nonetheless, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made.'
Yes, but would Obama survive such an effort? Even complying with his military masters, he is now said to receive four times as many death threats as George W. Bush.
Elected in a wave of optimism, his presidency is beginning to look highly precarious.

Love Sir Roger Moore's delightfully downmarket TV advertisement for the Post Office, in which the well-preserved old buffer is lionised by 'ee by gum' counter staff.

Particularly the moment when - swarmed over by lady fans of a certain age - the 82-year-old star is called upon to perform his trademark, eyebrow-lifting gesture from The Saint, the antediluvian TV series. Only in Britain could we savour such nonsense at the height of a postie strike.

Romance: Prince Albert of Monaco and girlfriend Charlene Wittstock

His Serene Highness Prince Albert of Monaco is the subject of a sordid-sounding court case, in which an American minder, Robert Eringer, claims £331,000 in wages and severance pay.
The case allegedly involves seedy details about his client's life. Including, inevitably, a video in which a woman is said to conduct a 'sex act' on 51-year-old Albert during his 40th birthday party.
Eringer says Albert hired him to help clean up Monaco but the Prince's chief interests - surprise, surprise - are 'go-karting and gallivanting'. After falling for a South African Olympic swimmer, Charlene Wittstock - who resembled his mother - Albert lost interest in his reforms, alleges Eringer.
But His Serene Highness's lawyers describe Eringer's action as 'nothing but an attempt to drag down a wonderful young man'.
Such scandals marred the life of his father, the late Prince Rainier, and his beautiful bride, Princess Grace of Monaco, the former Hollywood star Grace Kelly. As they have the lives of their other children, Princesses Caroline and Stephanie.
None of it matters very much. So I don't expect Eringer's case to make much difference. Monaco is preserved as a tax haven by the French for their own venal reasons.
Being the subject of alleged scandals is the price the Grimaldi family pays - the Riviera version of noblesse oblige - for enjoying the status of being Monaco's rulers.
Source dailymail.co.uk/