[Peace-discuss] New 'security team' announced, and the old one isn't even indicted yet

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Ceremonies in a Dark Young Man:
	The Inauguration is not a New Beginning

Can’t we hear what they’re saying?  The Democrats elected to Congress and the
Presidency in this autumn's election have made it clear that they intend to
dispense more public money to the richest people in this country via "bailouts"
-- and to kill more people in an expanded "war on terrorism."  These were of
course also the intentions of the outgoing administration.  The new
administration has simply added a certain ecumenical quality to its
predecessor's policies by being staffed with right-wing Democrats from the
Clinton administration, from Rahm Emanuel to Hillary Clinton.

The president-elect's so-called security team consists of Mrs. Clinton (whose
views on foreign policy were said during the primaries to be antithetical to
Obama's) at the State Department, Robert Gates (an apparatchik and fixer since
the Reagan administration, the real administrator of the Bush war policies since
the eclipse of the Neocons) at Defense, and James Jones (ex-commandant of the
Marine Corps and close friend of John McCain) as National Security Advisor.
It's a line-up of supporters of aggressive war -- the supreme international
crime, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal.

 From the point of view of the promoters of America's war with the Middle East,
that's not bad for a candidate who campaigned on being "against this war from
the beginning" and was able to mislead and neutralize the US antiwar movement.
Remember that the largest anti-war demonstrations in history occurred between
the US attack on Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and the US invasion of Iraq in
the spring of 2003.

Claiming to be against the Iraq war in order to defraud the anti-war movement
was the policy of the Democratic party in the election of 2006, when all admit
that they were given control of Congress especially to bring the war to an end.
But the Democrats have always supported the general US policy in the Middle
East, of which the Iraq war was a part.  Recently they -- and Obama -- have
simply pretended that they didn't.  And it worked.

WAR ON 'TERRORISM' -- OR THE MIDDLE EAST?

The US political system, particularly the Democrats, have worked hard to prevent
an understanding -- and even any public discussion -- of the war that the US is
carrying on this winter and into the coming year in the Middle East.  The new
administration will continue to present it (falsely) as a "war on terrorism."

It is instead an imperialist war to control Middle East energy resources, a
cornerstone of US policy for decades, in which there has been no change.  The US
goal in every administration for half a century has been to secure by means of
the control of Middle East oil and natural gas what senior Obama foreign policy
advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (who was National Security Advisor thirty years ago)
calls "indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian
economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region." Those
economies in Europe and northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are the
real rivals to US economic hegemony, and the control of energy resources gives
the US the whip-hand.

The theatres of this war stretch from the Mediterranean to the subcontinent (as
we've seen in the Mumbai attacks), and from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa.
(There was even some speculation that the Mumbai attacks were connected to the
Indian navy's attack on Somalian pirates, themselves a response to American
devastation of Somalia; they were in any case surely prompted by the desire to
disrupt the US-supported rapprochement between Pakistan and India, against the
resistance to US domination of "AfPak," as they say in Washington.)   As the
Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war of the 1960s-70s spread murder and environmental
desolation across SE Asia, so the Clinton-Bush-Obama war of the current decade
involves all of SW Asia and environs -- an area far more important to the US
than SE Asia ever was.

In spite of the hundreds of thousands of people our government has recently
killed in SW Asia, and the increase in killing planned for the coming year, we
still have a long way to go before we begin to equal the bloodbath we visited on
SE Asia (because the South Vietnamese refused to follow orders and install the
government that we had picked out for them).  The Clinton and Bush
administrations each killed about a million people in SW Asia, but perhaps four
million were killed by the US government in SE Asia; so far only about 5,000
Americans have been sent to die in SW Asia -- 50,000 were killed in SE Asia.
So, on form, there is plenty of room on the upside for killing in the coming
years of the decade...

Noam Chomsky says, "With regard to the Middle East, policy has been quite stable
since World War II, when Washington recognized that Middle East oil supplies are
'a stupendous source of strategic power' and 'one of the greatest material
prizes in world history.' That remains true ... there is, currently, no
substantial basis for expecting any significant change under a new
administration with regard to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, or any
other crucial issue involving the Middle East."  (And Obama's discussion of
Israel and the oppression of the Palestinians during the campaign  "leaves us
with nothing except his fervent professions of love for Israel and dismissal of
Palestinian concerns." )

FORTY YEARS ON

The presidential election that the election of 2008 most closely resembles is
that of 1968.  In each case, a party that had controlled the presidency for two
terms was waging an unpopular war.  (Almost three-quarters of  Americans
disapproved of the US government's policy in Vietnam in 1968, about the same
percentage who disapprove of its policy in Iraq today.)  And in each case, the
election went to the other major party (Republicans in 1968, Democrats in 2008)
-- in substantially less than a landslide -- after they fielded an ambiguous
anti-war candidate. (Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate in 1968, said that
he had "a secret plan for ending the Vietnamese war.")

What is more instructive about the two elections are not the similarities but
the differences.  For all that Obama's position is like Nixon's, there was in
1968 a vigorous and independent anti-war movement that the Nixon administration
(notably its National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger) knew that they had to
deal with.  No such movement exists today: Obama's real victory is successfully
to have co-opted it.

There's a second and perhaps more important difference between America of 1968
and today: inequality in income (and even more in wealth) -- having declined
from the Great Depression to 1968 -- has increased rapidly since 1968 and is now
back to 1929 levels.  Of course there is no recursion to the general social
situation of  1968, much less to that of 1929.  The US is a far more civilized
society than it was forty years ago, as the election of an African-American as
president (and the major-party candidacy  of two women) illustrates.  But wages
have been generally flat for the large majority of Americans since about 1973,
while a tiny minority have increased their wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
That after all was the goal of the successful counterattack by capitalism in the
last 35 years that goes by the name of "neoliberalism" in the rest of the world.
   Americans for the most part don't know what to call the vast politico-economic
crusade to increase the wealth of the few that took control in the Reagan and
Thatcher governments and subsequently ('conservatism' won't do).  But  class
differences are clearly more pronounced in America today, as tacitly admitted by
liberal support for diversity as a substitute for equality.  (See Walter Benn
Michaels' important 2006 book,  "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.")

OBAMA AS BUSH, CLINTON -- OR NIXON?

With the advent of winter 2008, we have already an answer to the question, Will
the Obama administration be George Bush's third term, or Bill Clinton's?  As we
survey the personnel in place and the proposed policies, it's clear that it will
be both.  Ignoring style, we see that the continuity in US policy, at home and
even more abroad, is remarkable.  Mark Twain once observed that history doesn't
repeat itself, but it does rhyme...

But Obama is not Bush or Clinton: he's Nixon -- without the liberalism.
Progressive policies (especially in environmental matters) were forced upon the
Nixon-Ford administration by "the sixties" (which began late and peaked in the
1970s -- provoking the neoliberal backlash). Like Nixon, Obama will continue and
even intensify the metastasizing war that he inherits, even though he ran
against it.  The repudiation of Nixon in the 1970s led to the end of a war and
an efflorescence of domestic progressivism.  Despite all the differences, we may
perhaps be permitted to hope for a rhyme in 2010s.

President-elect Obama is a dark man -- only trivially so in regard to the amount
of melanin in his skin, although that seems to be the most celebrated aspect of
his election.   Much darker were his purposes in pursuing the traditional
American policies of war and the enrichment of the few, while presenting himself
in the campaign as "a blank slate on which supporters could write their wishes,"
as Chomsky said.  Darkest of all are the prospects for peace and human
development in a world dominated by yet another American administration pursuing
those policies.

     ###