By William Blum
The
New Yorker magazine in its July 14 issue ran a cover cartoon that achieved
instant fame. It showed Barack Obama wearing Muslim garb in the Oval
Office with a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. Obama is delivering
a fist bump to his wife, Michelle, who has an Afro hairdo and an assault
rifle slung over her shoulder. An American flag lies burning in the
fireplace. The magazine says it’s all satire, a parody of the crazy
right-wing fears, rumors, and scare tactics about Obama’s past and ideology.
The cartoon makes fun of the idea that
Barack and Michelle Obama are some kind of mixture of Black Panther,
Islamist jihadist, and Marxist revolutionary. But how much more educational
for the American public and the world it would be to make fun of the
idea that Obama is even some kind of progressive.
I’m more concerned here with foreign
policy than domestic issues because it’s in this area that the US government
can do, and indeed does do, the most harm to the world, to put it mildly.
And in this area what do we find? We find Obama threatening, several
times, to attack Iran if they don’t do what the United States wants
them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan
if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would
be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling
for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan;
wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state;
totally ignoring Hamas, an elected ruling party in the occupied territory;
decrying the Berlin Wall in his recent talk in that city, about the
safest thing a politician can do, but with no mention of the Israeli
Wall while in Israel, nor the numerous American-built walls in Baghdad
while in Iraq; referring to the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez
as “authoritarian”, but never referring similarly to the government
of George W. Bush, certainly more deserving of the label; talking with
the usual disinformation and hostility about Cuba, albeit with a token
reform re visits and remittances. But would he dare mention the outrageous
case of the imprisoned Cuban Five[1] in his frequent references to fighting
terrorism?
While an Illinois state senator in January
2004, Obama declared that it was time “to end the embargo with
Cuba” because it had “utterly failed in the effort to overthrow
Castro.” But speaking as a presidential candidate to a Cuban-American
audience in Miami in August 2007, he said he would not “take off
the embargo” as president because it is “an important inducement
for change.”[2] He thus went from a good policy for the wrong reason
to the wrong policy for the wrong reason. Does Mr. Obama care any more
than Mr. Bush that the United Nations General Assembly has voted —
virtually unanimously — 16 years in a row against the embargo?
In summary, it would be difficult to
name a single ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) that Obama has not been
critical of, or to name one that he has supported. Can this be mere
coincidence?
The fact that Obama says he’s willing
to “talk” to some of the “enemies” more than the
Bush administration has done sounds good, but one doesn’t have to be
too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public
relations gimmick. It’s only change of policy that counts. Why doesn’t
he simply and clearly state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran
first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else?
As to Iraq, if you’re sick to the core
of your being about the horrors US policy brings down upon the heads
of the people of that unhappy land, then you must support withdrawal
— immediate, total, all troops, combat and non-combat, all the Blackwater-type
killer contractors, not moved to Kuwait or Qatar to be on call. All
bases out. No permanent bases. No permanent war. No timetables. No approval
by the US military necessary. No reductions in forces. Just OUT. ALL.
Just like what the people of Iraq want. Nothing less will give them
the opportunity to try to put an end to the civil war and violence instigated
by the American invasion and occupation and to recreate their failed
state.
George W. Bush, 2006: “We’re going
to stay in Iraq to get the job done as long as the government wants
us there.”[3]
George W. Bush, 2007: “It’s their
government’s choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.”[4]
Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak
al-Rubaie, 2008: “said his government was ‘impatiently waiting’
for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops.”[5]
Barack Obama, 2008: We can “redeploy
combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that
would remove them in 16 months.”[6]
Obama’s terms of withdrawal equals no
withdrawal. Literally. Has he ever said that the war is categorically
illegal and immoral? A war crime? Or that anti-American terrorism in
the world is the direct result of oppressive US policies? Instead he
calls for a troop increase and “the first truly 21st century military
… We must maintain the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.”[7]
Why of course, that’s what the people of the United States and the people
of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rest of the people in this sad world
desperately desire and need — greater American killing power! Obama
is not so much concerned with ending America’s endless warfare as he
is with “succeeding” in them, by whatever perverted definition
of that word.
And has he ever dared to raise the obvious
question: Why would Iran, even if nuclear armed, be a threat to attack
the US or Israel? Any more than Iraq was such a threat. Which was zero.
Instead, he has said things like “Iran continues to be a major
threat” and repeats the tiresome lie that the Iranian president
called for the destruction of Israel.[8]
Obama, one observer has noted, “opposes
the present US policy in Iraq not on the basis of any principled opposition
to neo-colonialism or aggressive war, but rather on the grounds that
the Iraq war is a mistaken deployment of power that fails to advance
the global strategic interests of American imperialism.”[9]
He and his supporters have made much
of the speech he delivered in the Illinois state legislature in 2002
against the upcoming US invasion of Iraq. But two years later, when
he was running for the US Senate, he declared: “There’s not that
much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this
stage.”[10] Since taking office in January 2005, he has voted to
approve every war appropriation the Republicans have put forward. He
also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite
her complicity in the Bush Administration’s false justifications for
going to war in Iraq. In doing so, he lacked the courage of 12 of his
Democratic Party Senate colleagues who voted against her confirmation.
If you’re one of those who would like
to believe that Obama has to present moderate foreign policy views to
be elected, but once he’s in the White House we can forget that he lied
to us repeatedly and the true, progressive man of peace and international
law and human rights will emerge … keep in mind that as a US Senate
candidate in 2004 he threatened missile strikes against Iran[11], and
winning that election apparently did not put him in touch with his inner
peacenik.
When, in 2005, the other Illinois Senator,
Dick Durbin, stuck his neck out and compared American torture at Guantanamo
to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot
or others — that had no concern for human beings”, and was angrily
denounced by the right wing, Obama stood up in the Senate and … defended
him? No, he joined the critics, thrice calling Durbin’s remark a “mistake”.[12]
One of Obama’s chief foreign policy advisers
is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a man instrumental in provoking Soviet intervention
in Afghanistan in 1979, which was followed by massive US military supplies
to the opposition and widespread war. This gave rise to a generation
of Islamic jihadists, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and more
than two decades of anti-American terrorism. Asked later if he had any
regrets about this policy, Brzezinski replied: “Regret what? That
secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing
the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The
day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President
Carter, in substance: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR
its Vietnam war.”[13]
Another prominent Obama adviser — from
a list entirely and depressingly establishment-imperial — is Madeleine
Albright, who should always wear gloves because her hands are caked
with blood from her roles in the bombings of Iraq and Yugoslavia in
the 1990s.
In a primary campaign talk in March,
Obama said that “he would return the country to the more ‘traditional’
foreign policy efforts of past presidents, such as George H.W. Bush,
John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.”[14] Use your imagination. Bloody
serial interventionists, all.
Why have well-known conservatives like
George Will, David Brooks, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough, and others
spoken so favorably about Obama’s candidacy?[15] Whatever else, they
know he’s not a threat to their most cherished views and values.
Given all this, can we expect a more
enlightened, less bloody, more progressive and humane foreign policy
from Mr. Barack Obama? Forget the alleged eloquence and charm; forget
the warm feel-good stuff; forget the interminable clichés and platitudes
about hope, change, unity, and America’s indispensable role as world
leader; forget all the religiobabble; forget John McCain and George
W. Bush … All that counts is putting an end to the horror — the bombings,
the invasions, the killings, the destruction, the overthrows, the occupations,
the torture, the American Empire.
Al Gore and John Kerry both took the
progressive vote for granted. Neither had ever been particularly progressive
themself. Each harbored a measure of disdain for the left. Both paid
a heavy price for the neglect. I and millions like me voted for Ralph
Nader, or some other third-party candidate, or stayed home. Obama is
doing the same as Gore and Kerry. Progressives should let him know that
his positions are not acceptable, keeping up the anti-war pressure on
him and the Democratic Party at every opportunity. For whatever good
it just might do.
I’m afraid that if Barack Obama becomes
president he’s going to break a lot of young hearts. And some older
ones as well.
Writer Norman Solomon has written: “These
days, an appreciable number of Obama supporters are starting to use
words like “disillusionment.” But that’s a consequence of
projecting their political outlooks onto the candidate in the first
place. The best way to avoid becoming disillusioned is to not have illusions
in the first place.”
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World’s Only Super
Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political
Memoir.
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
NOTES
[1] William Blum, “Cuban Political Prisoners … in the United
States“
[2] Washington Post, February 25, 2008;
p.A4
[3] New York Times. December 1, 2006,
p.1
[4] White House press conference, May
24, 2007
[5] Washington Post, July 9, 2008
[6] Obama’s website: www.barackobama.com/issues/
[7] Speech to the Chicago Council on
Global Affairs, April 23, 2007
[8] Haaretz.com (leading Israeli newspaper),
May 16, 2007
[9] Bill Van Auken, Global Research,
July 18, 2008 — http://www.globalresearch.ca/
[10] Chicago Tribune, July 27, 2004
[11] Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2004
[12] Congressional Record, June 21, 2005,
p.S6897
[13] For the full Brzezinski interview
see http://members.aol.com/bblum6/
[14] Associated Press, March 28, 2008
[15] See, for example, Peter Wehner,
“Why Republicans Like Obama”, Washington Post, February 3,
2008, p.B7