[Peace-discuss] Insulating policy from popular opinion

[C. G. Estabrook]

[As the AP reports on (and tries to minimize) a poll that shows that 
60% of Americans want US troops out of Iraq in six months -- and 
dissatisfaction with Bush's war has climbed to an all-time high of 71 
per cent -- Counterpunch continues the account of the Democrats' 
frenzied attempt to neutralize the antiwar views of the majority of 
Americans.  Cockburn also has our own Sen. Obama dead to rights: "I've 
never heard a politician so desperate not to offend conventional elite 
opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright."  I think in 
fact Cockburn is too generous to Sen. Durbin's rather cowardly retreat 
-- but remember that G. Bush now has the power, thanks to the MCA, to 
declare you an enemy combatant and treat you like Jose Padilla.  Maybe 
cowardice is the better part of valor... --CGE]

	Liberal Consensus Hardens for More Troops to Iraq;
	Meet Senator Slither; Farewell, Jeane Kirkpatrick
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Here's comes Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, handpicked by Nancy Pelosi 
to head the House Intelligence Committee and he's calling for 20,000 
more U.S. troops to be sent to Iraq. Reyes says they're needed to crush 
the Shi'a and Sunni militias. Didn't I tell to you right here, after the 
Nov 7 "peace moment" the polls, that the Democrats would fall into line 
behind Senator John McCain? The minute Jack Murtha made his run for 
House Majority leader the liberal establishment began to take a stand 
against all seditious talk of "immediate redeployment". You can scarcely 
open up the New York Times without tripping over a piece by Michael 
Gordon reporting yet another thoughtful military man -- he put up 
General Zinni in this capacity last week -- saying that the prudent 
short-term course would be to send more troops to Iraq.

Contrast this with the angry floor speech Republican Senator Gordon 
Smith of Oregon, the potato king of Pendleton, who said straighforwardly 
on Thursday night that he'd had it with the president that the US should 
"cut and run, cut and walk or whatever ... "

You want more evidence of Democratic spinelessness? How about the 
confirmation of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense by the U.S. Senate, 
95 to 2. Not a single Democrat voted against this slippery survivor of 
the Iran-contra scandal, who spent the early part of his intelligence 
career at the CIA and NSC, inflating the Soviet threat and leaking 
fictions about the KGB plot to kill the pope to neocon fantasists like 
Clare Sterling. The two No votes came from Santorum of Pennsylvania and 
Bunning of Kentucky. Some of the Democrats voting Aye this time voted No 
on Gates when he was up for confirmation as Bush Sr's CIA chief back in 
1991.

In our national public life these days, if you want to make any 
realistic recommendation on policy options, you have to be over 75, 
plenty of money in the bank and with nothing left to lose. Take Jimmy 
Carter and James Baker. Carter denounces Israel's "imprisonment wall" 
and Baker slips Palestinians' right of return into his Study Group's 
road map to peace.

Another 80-year old, Jeane Kirkpatrick, apparently saw reason in her 
fading years. Her friend Jack Kemp says that she would meet him on the 
way to church and lament the folly of the US attack on Iraq. This 
ur-neo-con would, so Kemp said, denounce the younger neocons like 
William Kristol. I had to endure a servile interview with Kristol by 
NPR's Deborah Ames, in which he held forth on her fine distinctions 
between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

Since the point of Kirkpatrick's distinctions was to give intellectual 
buttress to crude imperial functions like cheering on Guatemalan mass 
murderers practicing genocide on Mayan Indians, Kristol at least 
reminded me of what a disgusting creature Kirkpatrick was, at least in 
the decades when she had measurable influence on U.S. foreign policy, in 
the Reagan years. As with all the Commentary crowd in the late 1970s the 
only intellectual challenge they ever offered was the matter of deciding 
whether they actually believed all the drivel they were writing. 
Kirkpatrick was one of the irksome, because she tricked out her 
absurdities with pretentious references to Hobbes and Kant, thus tipping 
off the rubes that here was a Great Mind at work.

I remember her at the Republican convention in New Orleans in 1980. 
Conservative queen bees like Kirkpatrick and Schafly had, in their 
proximate physical aspect, an undercurrent of erotic violence -- Jeane 
was surely a closet case -- that didn't really come through on camera. 
Rooted under the rostrum in the Superdome, peering up into Kirkpatrick's 
flaring nostrils I could see planes of her face that were normally 
flattened out in the bland imagery of videotape.

Of course she was talking about "national security" with her lips 
puckered into a moue of cruel delight as she foretold how Dukakis and 
the Democrats would leave America bound helpless beneath the Russian 
jackboot. The only jackboot I could keep in mind was hers: Jeane lashing 
savagely at the cuffed and whimpering body of effete liberalism.

In homage to her services in the Reagan years the state of Israel 
established a Jeane Kirkpatrick Memorial Forest. It's apparently an 
unimpressive bit of shrubbery, on the site of the village of Deir 
Yassin, next to the mental hospital.

Meet Senator Slither

The slithery junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama is ensuring 
himself a steady political diet of publicity by refusing to take his 
name out of consideration as a possible candidate for the Democratic 
presidential nomination in 2008. We're entering the time frame when all 
such aspirants have to make up their minds whether they can find the 
requisite money and political base. Senator Russell Feingold of 
Wisconsin, the obvious peace and justice candidate, has already decided 
that he can't, which gives us a pretty revealing insight into the 
weakness of the left these days.

It's a no-brainer for Obama to excite the political commentators by 
waving a "maybe" flag. It keeps the spotlight on him, and piles up 
political capital, whatever he decides to do in the end.

It's depressing to think that we'll have to endure Obamaspeak for 
months, if not years to come: a pulp of boosterism about the American 
dream, interspersed with homilies about "putting factionalism and party 
divisions behind us and moving on". I used to think Senator Joe 
Lieberman was the man whose words I'd least like to be force fed top 
volume if I was chained next to a loudspeaker in Camp Gitmo, but I think 
Obama, who picked Lieberman as his mentor when he first entered the US 
Senate, is worse. I've never heard a politician so desperate not to 
offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and 
forthright.

When Democrats fled Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq a 
year ago, few with more transparent calculation than Obama who voyaged 
to the Council on Foreign Relations on November 22, 2005, to soothe the 
assembled elites with such balderdash as "The President could take the 
politics out of Iraq once and for all if he would simply go on 
television and say to the American people 'Yes, we made mistakes" or "we 
need to focus our attention on how to reduce the U.S. military footprint 
in Iraq. Notice that I say 'reduce,' and not 'fully withdraw' or "2006 
should be the year that the various Iraqi factions must arrive at a fair 
political accommodation to defeat the insurgency; and three, the 
Administration must make available to Congress critical information on 
reality-based benchmarks that will help us succeed in Iraq."

Some Democrats working for Ned Lamont in the recent senate race in 
Connecticut eventually taken by Lieberman, running as an independent, 
are exceptionally bitter about the role played by Obama who made the 
calculation that Lieberman would win, and that he would not forfeit 
political capital by doing anything for his fellow Democrat, Lamont. (By 
contrast, Hillary Clinton gets good reviews from such Lamont workers as 
a politician who did what she could for their man.)

These hard feelings go back as far as the notorious political dinner in 
Connecticut in Marcdh of 2005, when Obama traveled to Connecticut to 
hail the pro-war Lieberman to the state's Democrats.  Obama, who runs a 
huge political fund-raising operation in Washington, knows where the 
money is, in the the right-center segment of the political landscape 
inhabited by the Democratic Leadership Council.

It's why he picked Lieberman, a DLC icon, as his mentor. The new arrival 
in Washington wanted to send out a swift signal to the corporate powers 
and Party donors that here was no boat-rocker from Chicago, but a safe 
pair of hands and an obedient pair of heels.

There ere was another, more substantive signal, keenly savored by the 
corporate world, where Obama voted for "tort reform", thus making it far 
harder for people to get redress or compensation.

As I wrote about Obama last year, Sometimes people comfort themselves 
with variants on what's called the intentional fallacy: in other words, 
as only the fifth black senator in US history, Obama has to bob and 
weave, placate the Man, while positioning himself at the high table as 
the people's champion. But in his advance to the high table Obama is 
diligently divesting himself of all legitimate claims to be any sort of 
popular champion, as opposed to another safe black, like Condoleezza 
Rice (whom Obama voted to confirm.) The Empire relishes such servants.

And so, Obama, the constitutional law professor, voted to close off any 
filibuster of Alito, and fled Senator Russell Feingold's motion to 
censure the President, declaring "my and Senator Feingold's view is not 
unanimous. Some constitutional scholars and lower court opinions support 
the president's argument that he has inherent authority to go outside 
the bounds of the law in monitoring the activities of suspected 
terrorists. The question is whether the president understood the law and 
knowingly flaunted it." That's not the question at all. The question is 
whether the Constitution permits its violation by the President, and the 
answer is no.

Obama, a self proclaimed educator in constitutional law, voted Yes on 
March 2 to final passage of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and 
Reauthorization Act, unlike ten of his Democratic colleagues.

A couple of weeks ago Obama unleashed another cloud of statesmanlike 
mush about Iraq to an upscale foreign policy crowd in Chicago. Trimming 
to new realities he's now talking about a four-to-six month time frame 
for beginning withdrawal from Iraq. Don't mistake this for any real 
agenda. It's a schedule that can be pulled in any direction, like a 
rubber mask from a Christmas stocking.

This week many Americans have stared aghast at the photos of Jose 
Padilla, manacled hand and foot, blinded by special goggles, being 
escorted by his US military jailers from his isolation cell to the 
dentist. His lawyers say that his horrible treatment, four years of 
total isolation and sensory deprivation, have rendered him incapable of 
defending himself.

The treatment of Padilla -- classed as "an enemy combatant" until US 
government prosecutors were forced to reclassify him as a criminal 
defendant earlier this year -- was obviously a diligent exercise in 
torture, akin to what has been meted out to "enemy combatants" held in 
the US concentration camp at Guantanamo. Last year Illinois' senior US 
senator, Dick Durbin, bravely got into trouble for likening conditions 
at Guantanamo to those in a Nazi or Stalin-era camp. This was one of 
Durbin's finer moments, as he read an FBI man's eyewitness describing 
how he had entered interview rooms "to find a detainee chained hand and 
foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. 
Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left 
there for 18-24 hours or more."

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent 
describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you 
would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets 
in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no 
concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the 
action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. It is not too 
late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course."

The right-wing mad-dog crowd jumped on Durbin, and eventually he paid 
the penalty of having to eat crow on the Senate floor. His fellow 
senator from Illinois, Obama, did not support him in any way. He said, 
"we have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each 
other across the aisle and that is particularly pronounced when we make 
mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a 
while...and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope 
of how we've operated and interacted with people, will override whatever 
particular mistake we make."

That's three uses of the word "mistake". Obama had his fingers stuck in 
the wind as always. He bends to every breeze, as soon as he identifies 
it as coming from a career threatening quarter. This man is no leader...

	###