[Peace-discuss] Obama, imperialist?

[C. G. Estabrook]

     Running Dog Obama
     by Paul Street; Empire and Inequality Report, No, 24; July 29, 2007




         Barack Obama’s most recent attempt to prove his 
Harvard-certified safety to the doctrinal gatekeepers of the U.S. 
foreign policy establishment ought to make it clear once and for all 
that he is what the Maoists used to call a "running dog lackey of United 
States imperialism."





         WHITEWASHING PAST IMPERIAL CRIMINALITY



         I am referring to Obama’s July/August Foreign Affairs essay, 
titled “Renewing America’s Leadership” (Obama 2007).



         Reading as much like a campaign speech as an academic or policy 
document, this 5000-word article begins by praising Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt for “buil[ding] the most formidable military the world had 
ever known” and for giving “purpose to our struggle against fascism” 
with his “Four Freedoms.”



         It praises Harry Truman for “champion[ing] a bold new 
architecture to respond to the Soviet threat -- one that paired military 
strength with the Marshall Plan and helped secure the peace and 
well-being of nations around the world.”



         It commends Obama’s special historical role model John 
Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) for “moderniz[ing] our military doctrine, 
strengthen[ing] our conventional forces, and creat[ing] the Peace Corps 
and the Alliance for Progress” to “to show people everywhere America at 
its best” while “colonialism crumbled and the Soviet Union achieved 
effective nuclear parity.”



         “Our Struggle Against Fascism”



         Funny how Obama didn’t actually break-out the “Four Freedoms”: 
freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear 
and freedom of worship.  Maybe that’s because the United States 
policymakers from Roosevelt II through Kennedy (and beyond) regularly 
violated most of them in the enforcement of their particular imperial 
concept of the “national interest.” During the middle and late 1930s, US 
policymakers helped enable the rise of European fascism that culminated 
in Hitler’s march of terror. The US watched with approval as Fascist 
darkness set over Europe during the inter-war years. American 
policymakers saw Italian, Spanish, German and other strains of the 
European fascist disease as a welcome counters to “the Soviet threat” – 
essentially the demonstration Russia made of the possibilities for 
national outside the capitalist world system – and to Left movements, 
parties and related social-democratic policy drifts within Western Europe.



         In 1937, Roosevelt’s U.S. State Department’s European Division 
argued that European fascism was compatible with America’s economic 
interests. This key diplomatic agency reported that fascism’s rise was a 
natural response of “the rich and middle classes” to the threat posed by 
“dissatisfied masses,” who, with the “the example of the Russian 
Revolution before them,” might “swing to the left.” Fascism, the State 
Department argued, “must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by 
the disillusioned middle class, will again turn to the left.” The French 
Popular Front government of the middle 1930s was an example of the 
democratic socialist threat that made fascism acceptable to American 
officials before Hitler launched his drive for a New World Order.



         It is true that fascism became an avowed U.S. enemy during 
WWII. This did not occur, however, until fascism, holding power in two 
leading imperialist states, directly attacked U.S. interests. American 
policymakers intervened against fascism on the basis of perceived 
national self-interest, not out of any particular concern for the human 
rights of the French or, for that matter, European Jews or anyone else 
(Zinn 2003, pp. 407-410; Chomsky 1991, pp. 37-42).



         After the war, America’s accommodation of European and Asian 
fascism in the inter-war period became something of a model for U.S. 
Third World policy. In the name of resisting supposedly expansionist 
Soviet influence and anti-capitalism, the U.S. sponsored, funded, 
equipped, and provided political cover for numerous “Third World 
fascist” regimes. In doing so, it enlisted and protected numerous Nazi 
War criminals (e.g. Klaus Barbie) with anti-Left “counter-insurgency” 
skills deemed useful by “the Good War’s” victorious empire.





         “The Greatest Thing in History”



         The post-World War II era and the Cold War began with Truman’s 
perpetration of one of the greatest war crimes in history.  He ordered 
the monumentally mass-murderous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki well 
after U.S. authorities knew that Japan was decisively defeated and 
looking to surrender. He did so with full knowledge that the Japanese 
only required assurances that the institution of the Emperor could be 
permitted to remain intact – a condition he agreed to meet after but not 
before dropping the bombs. Upon learning about the destruction of 
Hiroshima, he remarked, “this is the greatest thing in history.” His 
decision to use the atom bomb was about advancing U.S. global power 
vis-à-vis Russia and the rest of the world in the post-WWII era.  It was 
not about saving American or Japanese lives (Alperovitz 1995).



         The Cold War Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ 
determination to use nuclear weapons as a tool of unilateral imperial 
advancement hatched a nuclear arms race that almost turned fatal in 
October of 1962.  We are still living with the lethal consequences of 
that arms race, which could have been prevented if the U.S. had put 
atomic power to internationalist and multilateral instead of murderous 
and imperial use.  The arch-Cold Warrior Kennedy was an especially 
dangerous transgressor.  He rode into the White House partly on the 
transparently false “missile gap” campaign suggestion that the 
Eisenhower administration had “permitted” the Soviet Union to achieve 
nuclear parity with the U.S – a great deception that Obama revealingly 
embraces 47 years later.



         “Scaring the Hell Out of the American People”



         “Greatest Generation” U.S. planners and policy makers continued 
with the restoration of fascist power in “liberated” Italy and 
intervened for elite class rule and against popular social revolution in 
the Balkans. In proclaiming the militantly U.S.-globalist Truman 
Doctrine, the Truman administration smeared democratic struggles in 
Greece as a Soviet “Communist” export. It did this in order to “Scare 
the Hell out of the American people” so they would accept the permanent 
imperial re-militarization of U.S. society and policy – helping thereby 
to sustain and expand the powerful “military industrial complex” that 
Dwight Eisenhower left the White House warning Americans about.



         Consistent with that goal, Truman and two key members of his 
cabinet, including George Marshall “systematically deceived Congress and 
the public into thinking that the USSR was about to launch World Wear 
III with an invasion of Europe in 1948.” They did this, Frank Kofsky has 
shown, in order “to push through their foreign policy program, 
inaugurate a huge military buildup and bail out the near bankrupt 
airline industry” (Kofsky 1993).





         The Real “Soviet Threat”: Who Deterred Who?



         From the Truman Doctrine on, the basic Cold War pattern was set 
for the U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across 
the planet.  Some of the most egregious subsequent examples – the 
Bushcons did not invent “regime change”  - came in Iran (CIA coup 1953), 
Guatemala (U.S.-sponsored and directed coup and military takeover 1954), 
Chile (U.S.-sponsored coup and military takeover, 1973), Indonesia (U.S. 
sponsored military takeover 1965) are just some of the more spectacular 
examples in a long list. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, 
leftists and intellectuals paid with their lives for the  U.S. campaign 
against independent development and social justice in the Third World.



         When Third World proxies were unavailable or inadequate for the 
task of “deterring democracy” (Chomsky 1991)  in the Third World, U.S. 
forces intervened directly with massive assaults, as in Korea 
(1950-1954) and Vietnam (1962-1975). The latter assault, which killed 3 
million Indochinese and destroyed Vietnam’s capacity for independent 
development beyond Western supervision (the point of the U.S. attack), 
was fundamentally “escalated from state terror to aggression” (Chomsky 
1993, p.1) by the Kennedy administration



         Cuba was spared such direct U.S. intervention largely because 
the Soviet Union deterred the United States from launching a full-scale 
attack on the Cuban Revolution.  Kennedy was forced to stand down from a 
planned invasion but continued to maintain major and provocative 
terrorist operations (under the guise of “Operation Mongoose”) in Cuba 
during and after the missile crisis of 1962 (Chomsky 2002, pp. 7-9). .



         In the U.S.-USSR Cold War relationship, it was the Soviets not 
the Americans who are most accurately described as the great power 
exercising deterrence against a globally ambitious other – a basic truth 
unmentionable outside officially marginal circles (Chomsky 1991, pp.9-68).



         Washington consistently justified its post-WWII record of 
global criminality with a great myth that Obama naturally embraces: the 
Soviet-“communist” campaign for world conquest. But honest U.S. 
assessments at the time acknowledged that the real Soviet danger was 
rather different. It was that the USSR modeled the possibility of 
independent national development beyond the parameters of U.S.-led 
world-capitalist supervision  The actual "Soviet threat" arose not from 
any Soviet commitment to world revolution (long since abandoned with the 
defeat of Trotsky) but from “Marxist” Russia’s determination to follow 
its own path and its concomitant refusal “to complement the industrial 
economies of the West” (Chomsky 1991, p. 27).



         This refusal was a terrible example for the Third World, as far 
as leading Truman and Eisenhower planners like George Kennan and Dean 
Acheson – both warmly praised in past Obama  publications and speeches 
(see for example Obama 2006, pp. 284, 304) – were  concerned.  The 
illusory Soviet quest for “world domination” and the related “domino 
theory” were always covers for the real specter haunting "Greatest 
Generation" planners in the post-WWII world: the danger that peripheral 
states would choose to follow their own autonomous road of development, 
outside and against the selfish, world-systemic needs of the 
state-capitalist core, run by and for the United States (Chomsky 1995, 
pp. 78-82, 91-93).





         “To Maintain This Position of Disparity”.



         To grasp some of the lovely “Four Freedoms” sentiment behind 
such supposedly benevolent U.S. Cold War policies as the sponsorship of 
vicious military dictatorships in Indonesia, Iran, Greece and Brazil (to 
name just a few U.S. “Free World” partners), we can consult an 
interesting  formulation from Obama’s wise “Wilsonian” hero George 
Kennan (see Obama 2006, p, 284).    As Kennan explained in Policy 
Planning Study 23, crafted for the State Department planning staff in 1948:



         “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 
percent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the 
object of envy and resentment.  Our real task in the coming period is to 
devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this 
position of disparity…to do so we will have to dispense with all 
sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be 
concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…We should 
cease to talk about vague and …unreal objectives such as human rights, 
the raising of living standards, and democratization.  The day is not 
far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. 
The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better….we should 
not hesitate before police repression by the local government” (Quoted 
in Chomsky 1995, pp. 9-11)



         The Marshall Plan, the U.S. reconstruction project for the 
war-ravaged European core, was loaded with selfish imperial content. 
U.S. assistance was predicated on investment and purchasing rules that 
favored U.S.-based corporations and on the political marginalization of 
Left parties that had gained prestige leading the fight against fascist 
forces the U.S. had initially welcomed as counters to the European Left. 
  The U.S. military stood ready to intervene directly in the event of 
Left electoral victories in Western Europe.



         Throughout the American “struggle against fascism” – a war won 
primarily by the workers, soldiers and peasants of the Soviet Union – 
U.S. planners worked behind the scenes to make sure that the U.S. would 
emerge as the unchallenged hegemon in the world investment and trading 
system (Zinn 2003, p. 413).



         In a similar vein, JFK’s Alliance for Progress was all about 
defeating the Cuban-inspired specter of Leftist and independent 
development and entrenching the power of U.S-sponsored oligarchs and 
militaries in Latin America.  It never delivered on its false promises 
of significant land reform and economic development for the Latin 
American people (Miroff 1976, pp. 110-142).



         Yes, by all means, let us hail FDR, Harry Hiroshima Truman, and 
JFK and their magnificent contributions to “the peace and well-being of 
nations around the world.”









         EVADING AND JUSTIFYING CURRENT IMPERIAL CRIMINALITY



         Does if it matter if Obama whitewashes past imperial U.S. 
violence and propaganda? Of course it does.  Those who forget, delete, 
deny or condone past imperial (and other) crimes and deceptions are 
likely to commit and justify new such deadly transgressions in the 
future if they attain the power to do so. You can learn a lot about what 
a policymaker and politician will do in the present and future by 
knowing his or her take on the all-too living past.



         “To Leave Iraq a Better Place”



         As it happens, Obama’s Foreign Affairs article contains more 
than dubious historical reflection to feed suspicions that he (like 
Hillary and perhaps John Edwards – see Street 2007a and Street 2007b) 
can be expected to fulfill Maoist expectations if he reaches the 
imperial throne. Moving from the supposedly glorious post-WWII past he 
wants to restore (“we can be [Kennedy’s] America again” he says) to the 
shameful present, when an especially clumsy and stubborn Republican 
administration has dropped the ball of Empire. Obama criticizes fellow 
Harvard graduate George W. Bush for “respond[ing] 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. 
It was this tragically misguided view,” Obama claims, “that led us into 
a war in Iraq that never should have been authorized and never should 
have been waged.”



         Obama rips the White House for trying to “impose a military 
solution on a civil war between Sunni and Shiite factions."



         "The best chance we have to leave Iraq a better place,” Obama 
says, “is to pressure these warring parties to find a lasting political 
solution.” He argues that “only Iraqi leaders can bring real peace and 
stability to their country.” “We must make it clear we seek no permanent 
military bases in Iraq,” Obama ads.



         Too bad the Cheney-Bush administration did not invade Iraq in 
“response” to 9/11 or to “leave Iraq a better place.”  It exploited the 
“unconventional attacks” to launch an illegal, one-sided and state-based 
war of colonial occupation – long sought by neoconservative Bush 
insiders – to deepen U.S. control over Iraq and the Middle East’s 
stupendous, strategically hyper-significant energy resources.  It was 
the longstanding and bipartisan petro-imperialist ambitions of our 
foreign policymaking class  that “led us” into the war.



         Those ambitions and that “war” had and have nothing to do with 
improving Iraqi’s lives and have predictably deepened the crisis of 
Iraqi “life” – a long-running catastrophe the U.S. has been fueling 
since at least the 1980s.  The occupation has involved the building of a 
large number of in fact permanent military bases that an Obama (or a 
Hillary Clinton or Edwards or Richardson) presidency would never 
dismantle, as is suggested by the Senator’s claim that he would maintain 
an “over-the-horizon military force in the region to protect American 
personnel and facilities” inside Iraq.



         Too bad Obama’s superficially generous statement that Iraqi 
leaders alone can stabilize and pacify their country deletes the 
uncomfortable fact that the U.S. assault is the main force that has torn 
Iraqi apart and generated a civil war that has often been fanned quite 
directly by U.S. occupation authorities.  Also lost in Obama’s 
translation is the elementary moral fact that the U.S. owes Iraq massive 
reparations – to be configured and used in accord with the Iraqis’ needs.



         “This Enemy Operates Globally”



         Obama praises “our servicemen and servicewomen” for 
“perform[ing] admirably while sacrificing immeasurably.” Then he 
vilifies Islamic jihadists who “reject modernity, oppose America, and 
distort Islam” and who have “killed and mutilated tens of thousands of 
people just this decade. Because this enemy operates globally,” he 
observes it must be confronted globally.”



         Too bad the illegal U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan 
(Obama and other leading Democrats never criticize the latter colonial 
operation) have killed HUNDREDS of thousands of innocent Arab, Pashtun 
and other Southwest Asian civilians, helping explain why millions of 
Middle Eastern and Muslim people “oppose America[‘s]” Islam-distorting 
assault and support defensive jihad against Washington’s imperial 
invaders, policies, and structures.



         With over 700 military bases located in nearly every planet on 
the earth and a “defense” budget that accounts for roughly half the 
world’s military spending, the United States seems to most of the 
world’s population to be the relevant “enemy” who “operates globally.”



         And it’s too bad that "our" troops’ “admirable performance” in 
service to Bush’s imperial mission has involved shocking racist and 
imperial violence against civilians. As Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian 
report in the July 30th edition of The Nation, the occupation is  “a 
dark and depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to 
other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the 
French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the 
Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.”



         Many of fifty U.S. occupation veterans interviewed by Hedges 
and Al-Arian have “returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity 
between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the U.S. 
government and media.”  By returning GIs’ account, the war on the ground 
includes the gratuitous killing and torture of Iraqi civilians, 
including children.  The invasion involves the routine “indiscriminate” 
application of U.S. force and numerous “disturbing patterns of behavior 
by American troops.”



         “I guess while I was there [in Iraq],” one returning occupation 
soldier (Jeff Englehart, former Specialist, Third Brigade, First U.S. 
Army Infantry Division) told Hedges and Al-Arian, “ the general attitude 
was ‘ a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi. You know, so what?”



         Numerous veterans “described reckless firing once they left 
their compounds.  Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along 
the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them 
ablaze.  Others opened fire on children.  These shootings often enraged 
Iraqi witnesses.”



         “We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by 
photographs,” Hedges and Al-Arian report, “that some soldiers had so 
lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian 
corpses.”



         Twenty four veterans “said they had witnessed or heard stories 
from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by 
convoys.  These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported.”



         The killing of “unarmed Iraqis” is “so common many of the 
troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape.”



         Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where 
U.S. soldiers would “plant AK-47s” next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis 
they had butchered “to make it seems as if the civilian dead were 
combatants” (Hedges and Al-Arian 2007)



         “Mom, we killed women on the street today,” one U.S. soldier 
recently reported from Iraq.  “We killed kids on bikes” (Urbina 2007).



         If such savage criminality (ultimately traceable to top 
decision-makers in Washington) is what comes out of the United States’ 
purportedly advanced culture of “modernity,” we should not be mystified 
if many Middle Eastern people might wish for a pre-“modern” time when 
the region might be free of Americia's supposed civilizing mission.





         The Middle East’s “Only Established Democracy”



         Obama calls for the U.S. to “focus our attention and influence 
on the festering conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians -- a 
task that the Bush administration neglected for years. “Our starting 
point,” Obama says, “must always be a clear and strong commitment to the 
security of Israel, our strongest ally in the region and its only 
established democracy.”



         Too bad the increasingly militarized and regressive Israeli 
“democracy,” whose “security” is Obama’s declared first priority 
(“starting point”), rests on the racist, U.S.-protected occupation of 
Arab/Palestinian land – an occupation the American U.S. foreign policy 
establishment deeply supports.



         The False Specter of “Isolationism”



         Voicing an especially recurrent theme of his (see Obama 2006, 
pp. 303-304; Obama 2006a), Obama cautions Americans against becoming so 
disillusioned by Bush II’s foreign policy that they fall into the 
dangerous clutches of "isolationism." “After thousands of lives lost and 
billions of dollars spent,” Obama says, “many Americans may be tempted 
to turn inward and cede our leadership in world affairs. But this,” the 
junior Senator from Illinois warns, “is a mistake we must not make. 
America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, and the world 
cannot meet them without America.”



         Never mind that Americans are not veering towards isolationism. 
  They support neither aggressive unilateral U.S. imperialism nor 
isolationism but an enlightened and democratic internationalism that 
honors international law and shows respect for the wishes of others (see 
for example Chicago Council on Foreign Relations 2004).



         It is interesting that Obama measures the Iraq War body count 
in the “thousands” while accusing Islamo-terrorists of “killing and 
maiming tens of thousands.”  His use of the word “thousands” means that 
he sees imperial U.S. troops as the only mention-worthy victims in the 
Iraq War.   He deletes the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who have lost 
their lives in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Those deaths – like those of 
the one million or so Iraqis George Bush I and the “recognizably 
progressive if modest” (Obama 2006, pp. 34-35) Bill Clinton killed with 
“economic sanctions” during the 1990s – provide critical context for 
understanding why millions of Muslims and Middle Easterners “oppose 
America.”



         PROMISING FUTURE IMPERIAL CRIMINALITY



         Obama’s Foreign Affairs article gives people and states beyond 
U.S. borders strong reasons to fear the prospect of a United States with 
running dog Obama at the helm. “The American moment is not over, but it 
must be seized anew,” Obama proclaims, adding that “we must lead the 
world by deed and by example” and “must not rule out using military 
force” in pursuit of “our vital interests.”



         The last three words harken back to another Democratic 
imperialist’s “Carter Doctrine” (which updated the Monroe Doctrine for 
the global petro-capitalist era to include the Persian Gulf region in 
the United States’ inviolable sphere of special interest and unilateral 
action) and are a code phrase for other nations' oil, located primarily 
in the Middle East.



         “A strong military,” Obama says, “is, more than anything, 
necessary to sustain peace,” echoing George Orwell’s fictional 
totalitarian state of Oceana, which proclaimed that “War is Peace” and 
“Love is Hate.”



         We must “revitalize our military” (to foster peace), Obama 
declares, partly by adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 to the 
Marines.



         Do not rule out future overseas occupations carried out in the 
name of the “war on terror” by an Obama White House. “We must retain the 
capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and 
our vital interests,” Obama pronounces. “But 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.”



         Reassuring the bipartisan imperialist establishment that he 
will not be hamstrung by international law and civilized norms when “our 
vital interests” (other peoples’ petroleum, primarily) are "at stake," 
Obama says that “I will not hesitate to use force unilaterally, if 
necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests 
wherever we are attacked or imminently threatened.”



         Prepare to take cover, if you can, subject peoples of the 
oil-rich periphery!



         And do not rule out pre-emptive and even so-called preventive 
wars with Obama at the helm. “We must also consider using military force 
in circumstances beyond self-defense,” the junior Senator who would be 
Emperor declares, “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.”



         Sound familiar?





         Paul Street is an anti-centrist political commentator located 
in the Midwestern center of the United States. Street is the author of 
Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: 
Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the 
Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still 
Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) 
Street’s next book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A 
Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) 
Street can be reached at paulstreet99 at yahoo.com





         SELECTED SOURCES



         Gar Alperovitz 1995.  The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New 
York: Vintage, 1995).



         Chicago Council on Foreign Relations 2004.  Global Views 
(October 2004).



         Noam Chomsky 1991.  Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and 
Wang, 1991),



         Noam Chomsky 1993.  Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War 
and U.S. Political Culture (Boston, MA: South End, 1993).



         Noam Chomsky 1995.  What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Berkeley CA, 1995)



         Noam Chomsky 2002.  Understanding Power (New York: New Press, 
2002).



         Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian 2007.  "The Other War: Iraq 
Vets Bear Witness," The Nation (July 30, 2007).



         Frank Kofsky 1993.  Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).



         Bruce Mirroff 1976.  Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential 
Politics of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (New York: Longman’s, 1976).



         Barack Obama 2006.  The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on 
Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006).



         Barack Obama 2006a. “A Way Forward in Iraq,” Speech to Chicago 
Council on Global Affairs, Chicago Illinois (November 20, 2006), 
available online at http://obama.senate.gov/speech/061120-a_way_forward 
_in_iraq/index.html.



         Barack Obama 2007.  “Renewing American Leadership,” Foreign 
Affairs (July/August 2007), read online at 
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701faessay86401/barack-obama/renewing-american-leadership.html.



         Paul Street 2004.  “Keynote Reflections,” ZNet (July 29 2004), 
available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5951.



         Paul Street 2007a.  “ ‘Imperial Temptations:’ John Edwards, 
Barack Obama and the Myth of Post World War II U.S. Benevolence,” 
Dissident Voice (June 2, 2007), read online at 
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/06/john-edwards-barack-obama-and-the-myth-of-post-wwii-us-benevolence/ 
and History News Network (June 2, 2007) at 
http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/39738.html



         Paul Street 2007b. “Hillary’s War and the Next 9/11,” ZNet 
(July 5 2007), available online at 
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13215.



         Paul Street 2007c. “Obama’s White Appeal and the Perverse 
Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Black Agenda Report (June 
20 2007), read online at 
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=34.



         Paul Street 2007d.  “John Edwards and Dominant Media’s 
Selective Skewering of Populist Hypocrisy,” ZNet (June 29 2007), 
available online at 
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13177.



         Ian Urbina 2007.  "Even as Loved Ones Fight On, War Doubts 
Arise," New York Times, 15 July 2007, p. A1.



         Howard Zinn 2003.  A People’s History of the United States, 
1492-Present (New York: HarperPerennial 2003).


	###