[Peace-discuss] Obama admits to war views

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Jeremiah Wright controversy has exposed once again Obama's support for US 
war policy in the Middle East.  That support has been clear from the time of his 
campaign for the US Senate, although he has covered it with attacks on the war 
tactics (but not the overall strategy) of the Bush administration.

"Obama denounced [Wright's suggestion] that the United States was attacked 
because it engaged in terrorism on other people..." [NYT]. "When I say I find 
these comments appalling, I mean it," [Obama] declared. "It contradicts 
everything that I'm about and who I am" [G&M].

"Obama cited Wright's contention ... that U.S. actions overseas were partly to 
blame for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks ... Wright's statements 'offend me, 
they rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced and that's what 
I'm doing very clearly and unequivocally today,' Obama said in a news conference 
in Winston-Salem, North Carolina" [Bloomberg].

Of course what Obama supports -- aggressive war in the Middle East in "Afpak," 
Iran and Palestine as well as in Iraq -- is worse that terrorism and includes 
it, as the Nuremberg tribunal pointed out at the beginning of the post-WWII 
world. The tribunal, spelled out in the UN Charter, declared that initiation of 
a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from 
other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the 
whole.”

But Obama rejects Wright's quite accurate characterization of US policy. --CGE