[Peace-discuss] A bit about Obama…

[Morton K. Brussel]

An extract from a review [http://www.commondreams.org/archive/ 
2007/07/20/2648/] of Obama's Foreign Affairs article by Pierre  
Tristam. --mkb



…There’s more to Obama’s hawkish compulsions. He wants military  
ranks increased by 100,000. In this, he sounds indistinguishable from  
Mitt Romney’s prescription for the military, in the same issue of  
Foreign Affairs: “First, we need to increase our investment in  
national defense. This means adding at least 100,000 troops and  
making a long-overdue investment in equipment, armament, weapons  
systems, and strategic defense. The need to support our troops is  
repeated like a mantra in Washington. Yet little has been said about  
the commitment of resources needed to make this more than an empty  
phrase.” But where has the case been made for an expanded military  
force, if not for expanded and semi-permanent military commitments  
abroad? And who at this point ought to be enabling existing  
commitments, let alone expanded ones? We remain by far the nation  
with the biggest and costliest military in the world. The Pentagon’s  
budget is well in excess of all other nations’ military budgets  
combined. There’s not a force on earth that can challenge the  
military conventionally. It doesn’t need expansion. It may need some  
redirection. It certainly needs considerable contraction: There’s no  
need for a fleet of 400 ships, no need for a $10-billion-a-year  
“missile shield,” no need for the F-22 and the Joint Strike  
Fighter, no need for an endless list of military procurement that  
does nothing for the defense of the country and everything to grease  
the job-making base of a few congressman. And there’s no need for an  
American presence in Europe anymore. Those forces should redeploy.  
The Pentagon is sucking the marrow out of the federal budget and  
making a Sparta of this alleged “city upon a hill.”



Yet what does Obama do? He does Romney one better. He breaks down the  
numbers: “We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000  
soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines.” He restates the doctrine  
of using the military for nation-building: “We must also consider  
using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense in order to  
provide for the common security that underpins global stability — to  
support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction  
operations, or confront mass atrocities.” And he restates Bush’s  
doctrine of pre-emption, as in the case of Iran if it becomes  
necessary because “It is far too dangerous to have nuclear weapons  
in the hands of a radical theocracy” (because it’s not dangerous  
to have them in the hands of a dictatorship like Pakistan? Or in the  
hands of the only nation that has used them?) Henry Kissinger must be  
on Obama’s speed-dial. Just in case the jingoes haven’t got the  
point that Obama is all for the bang-bang, he notes again, using that  
metaphor so beloved by every Fox News talking head plus terminology  
of Rumsfeld vintage, how “we must also become better prepared to put  
boots on the ground in order to take on foes that fight asymmetrical  
and highly adaptive campaigns on a global scale.”

That last, incidentally, is another considerable contradiction. Three  
pages earlier Obama is lecturing us about how the “Bush  
administration responded to the unconventional attacks of 9/11 with  
conventional thinking of the past, largely viewing problems as state- 
based and principally amenable to military solutions.” So what’s  
this business about boots on the ground again? Intelligence, in every  
sense, is absent.

Obama does emphasize diplomacy. He’s been reading Dennis Ross’  
“Statecraft.” But Obama’s openings are severely restricted. Iran  
and Syria are OK to talk to. But there’s no mention of opening a  
dialogue with Hamas, let alone Hezbollah, the Taliban or al-Qaeda. So  
his international diplomatic initiatives are stuck in the very same  
“conventional thinking of the past, largely viewing problems as  
state-based,” that he so eagerly and justly criticizes Bush for. On  
Israel, the best he can say is the same old rehash about Israel  
being “our strongest ally in the region” (a doubtful assertion  
anymore) and this incredibly obtuse prescription from a few decades  
back: “we must help the Israelis identify and strengthen those  
partners who are truly committed to peace, while isolating those who  
seek conflict and instability.” In other words, don’t talk to  
Hamas. How different is that from the Bush approach? Not very.  
Obama’s thinking is muddy, haphazard, half-baked. And every few  
paragraphs - like money shots in porno movies - he throws in his bit  
of brawn to remind us again and again what a tough man he is: “To  
defeat al Qaeda, I will build a twenty-first-century military and  
twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist  
alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from  
Djibouti to Kandahar.” Take cover.

His understanding of this modern-day terrorism seems simplistic to  
infantile, too. …
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