[Peace-discuss] Street on Obama on the war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The strenuous self-promoter Barack Obama offered his wisdom on Iraq to 
the Chicago Council on Global Affairs today.  Not surprisingly, his 
wisdom differed little from that of the Bush administration, although he 
wanted to pretend it did.  Paul Street, recently AWARE's guest, has a 
good take on the real war views of this awful fraud. --CGE]

...I dove back into my borrowed copy of presidential candidate Barack 
Obama’s recent and sickening book “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on 
Reclaiming the American Dream” (New York, 2006). It’s been a tough slog 
through this ponderous monographic monument to centrist “pragmatic” 
wisdom and related personal political ambition.  Obama’s “Audacity” is a 
very slippery book for a very obvious reason: it is dedicated to 
convincing “progressives” that the Overnight BaRockstar is one of them 
while simultaneously reassuring the dominant policy and political class 
that he will never act to challenge existing domestic and imperial 
hierarchies.

I’m up to Obama's most nauseating chapter, titled “The World Beyond Our 
Borders,” which apparently received critical input from his good friend 
the imperial humanitarian Harvard professor Samantha Power (she is 
effusively thanked in the acknowledgements).  At one point in this 
chapter, Obama, who fancies himself something of a historian, holds 
forth as follows about the Vietnam War – an earlier racist, imperial and 
illegal U.S. invasion that killed at least 2 million Indochinese (the 
proportional American equivalent would have run into the tens of millions):

“The disastrous consequences of that conflict – for our credibility and 
prestige abroad, for our armed forces (which would take a generation to 
recover), and most of all for those who fought – have been amply 
documented.  But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was the bond 
of trust between the American people and their government – and between 
American themselves. As a consequence of a more aggressive press corps 
and the images of body bags flooding into the living rooms, Americans 
began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn’t 
always know what they were doing – and didn’t always tell the truth. 
Increasingly, many on the left voiced opposition not only to the Vietnam 
War but also [imagine!, P.S.] to the broader aims of American foreign 
policy.  In their view, President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the 
CIA, the ‘military industrial complex,’ and international institutions 
like the World Bank were all manifestations of American arrogance, 
jingoism, racism, capitalism and imperialism. Those on the right 
responded in kind, laying responsibility for the loss of Vietnam but 
also for the decline America’s standing in the world squarely on the 
‘blame America’ first crowd – the protestors, the hippies, Jane Fonda, 
the Ivy League intellectuals and liberal media..." (Obama, “Audacity of 
Hope,” pp. 287-288)

Oh the sickening stench of National Neanderthal Narcissism, and here 
(and elsewhere throughout “Audacity”) so wonderfully articulated by a 
sudden liberal savior that some deluded “progressives” are embracing as 
the ultimate living expression of homo sapiens’ noble species being – 
the “best and the brightest” of the early 21st century!

The “biggest casualty” of the war on Vietnam was suffered by ... the 
PEOPLE OF VIETNAM.  The terrible U.S. GI body count (58,000 during the 
war and more through suicide since) pales before the astonishing damage 
done to Indochinese villages, cities, infrastructure, ecology, 
agriculture – not to mention the two million people killed in more 
direct fashion.  The number of South Vietnamese civilians killed just in 
the CIA’s Operation Phoenix assassination program was equivalent to 45 
percent of the U.S. body count in Vietnam.

As for the supposed tragedy of the frayed “bond of trust between the 
American people and their government,” there are many of us who think 
that the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” is a very healthy thing. Its 
inoculation power has recently received a wonderful booster shot with 
massive popular repudiation of the criminal action against Iraq. It’s 
wonderful that the American people subject “their” foreign policy 
establishment to skeptical, even “distrustful” scrutiny and turned 
against an in fact racist, imperialist, and illegal war in which the 
children of “their” selected power “elite” were deemed too precious and 
privileged to “serve.” It’s fantastic that some of us understood the 
class basis of the imperialism that Obama sees as the mythological 
creation of left “caricature” (pp. 288).

Obama cannot acknowledge that the previous supposed “bond of trust” 
(whose dissolution he mourns) between the people and “their” government 
was based largely on Establishment lies calculated to “scare the Hell of 
the American people” with exaggerated Soviet and international 
“Communist” threats.  The deceptions were meant to induce the U.S. 
populace to cower under the permanent authoritarian umbrella of the 
National Security State and the wise and benevolent managers of Empire 
and Inequality, Inc. at home and abroad.

Does Obama really think the sovereign nation of Vietnam was America’s to 
“lose” in the first place? And does he wish (as he should) to include 
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (whom the technically black Obama loves to 
quote and cite) among those “on the left” who saw the Vietnam War as an 
expression of America’s broader imperialism and racism and of its 
related captivity to what Dwight Eisenhower identified as the “military 
industrial complex?”

King came to precisely those radical conclusions and went beyond them by 
tying it all to problems of race and class rule within the imperial 
homeland. As one see from reading his essential speeches and writings 
after 1966, the great civil rights leader saw social inequalities at 
home and criminal U.S. violence abroad as part of what he called “the 
triple evils that are interrelated:” (1) racism; (2) poverty/economic 
exploitation/capitalism; (3) militarism/imperialism.

The people of Iraq can be forgiven if they don’t share Obama’s sense 
that it was a good thing for the American armed forces to “recover” 
after Vietnam. The world has plenty to fear in the the specter of an 
Obamanation.

HATING A WAR BECAUSE IT’S NOT WORKING VS. HATING A WAR BECAUSE IT’S WRONG

After reflecting on the terrible damage that the Vietnam War did to 
AMERICANS and adding a few lines about his curious respect for Ronald 
Reagan (p. 289), Obama’s "Audacity" launches into an elegant, 
Harvard-certified critique of Bush II’s war on Iraq.  His discourse is 
full of standard “realist” foreign policy rhetoric along lines such as 
these: “I am convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic 
interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use 
force around the world” since “nobody benefits more that we do from the 
observance of international ‘rules of the road'" (p. 309).

In the 20 or so pages that he dedicates to the criminal occupation of 
Iraq, Obama makes it clear that he sees Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) as 
a terrible mistake – a “dumb” strategic error of historic proportions. 
What he can’t say or admit and perhaps doesn’t believe is that the 
invasion of Iraq was and remains a great moral and spiritual 
transgression – a loathsome war crime.

This is a telling silence. There were those who came to oppose the 
Vietnam War primarily because America’s mass-murderous “crucifixion of 
Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky) seemed finally not to be working for the 
goal of advancing U.S imperial power and there were those who opposed it 
because it was morally wrong (whether it was “working” or not).  The 
same division exists in regard to OIF. Obama is on the morally empty, 
“pragmatic” side of that ethical chasm, consistent with the counsel of 
his special foreign policy friend Samantha Power, who joined Morton 
Abramowitz to say the following in an April 2006 opinion-editorial 
telling the Democrats to “Get Loud, Get Angry!” over the Iraq War: “In 
recent months, the Democrats have taken steps to push for 
accountability.  But few have attracted media attention and all have 
slammed the Bush administration’s tactical blunders – intelligence 
failures, contract corruption, and torture – rather than declaring Iraq 
and enormous strategic blunder in the ear on terror.  Few have called 
the war what most Americans now understand it to have been: a mistake” 
(Samantha Power and Morton Abramowitz, “Democrats: Get Loud, Get 
Angry!,” Los Angeles Times, 10 April, 2006)

Especially after the mid-term revulsion “wave,” we will be hearing 
plenty of Democrats (and no tiny number of Republicans) easily admitting 
that the latest Iraq War was and is a horrible “strategic mistake.”  Big 
deal! Those of us who are not enthralled by conventional bipartisan 
imperial wisdom and the elite corporate-neoliberal consensus need to 
remind ourselves and our fellow Americans that the occupation of Iraq is 
– like the Vietnam War – a great imperial crime that is intimately 
related to savage domestic hierarchies that both of the in-power 
business parties are sworn to defend.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=11444