[Peace-discuss] Obama on the course set by Bush in his second term

[C. G. Estabrook]

A month after he won the White House Barack Obama is drawing a chorus of 
approval from conservatives who spent most of this year denouncing him as a man 
of the extreme left. “Reassuring”, says Karl Rove, of Obama’s cabinet 
selections. Max Boot, a rabid right-wing commentator, confesses, "I am 
gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come 
from a President McCain." In Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, mouthpiece of the 
neocons, Michael Goldfarb reviewed Obama’s appointments and declared that he 
sees “nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. 
The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his 
second term."

But on the liberal-left end of the spectrum, where Obama kindled extraordinary 
levels of enthusiasm throughout his campaign, the mood is swiftly swinging to 
dismay and bitterness. “How… to explain that not a single top member of Obama's 
foreign policy/national security team opposed the war?”  Katrina vanden Heuvel, 
editor of The Nation, asked last Monday. She went on, “For Obama, who's said he 
wants to be challenged by his advisors, wouldn't it have made sense to include 
at least one person on the foreign policy/national security team who would 
challenge him with some new and fresh thinking about security in the 21st century?”

“How nice, how marvelously nice it would be,” wrote the left-wing historian 
William Blum sarcastically here on the CounterPunch site last  week, “to have an 
American president who was infused with progressive values and political 
courage.”  Blum speedily made it clear that in his estimation Obama is not 
endowed with these desirable qualities: “He's not really against the war. Not 
like you and I are. During Obama's first four years in the White House, the 
United States will not leave Iraq. I doubt that he'd allow a complete withdrawal 
even in a second term. “

Similar sentiments came from another popular left-wing reporter, Jeremy Scahill, 
who wrote here on Tuesday, “The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan 
Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support 
for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and 
a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George 
HW Bush's time in office to the present.”

Suddenly a familiar specter is shuffling back under the spotlights. A long piece 
on Obama’s foreign policy advisors last Tuesday carried the headline, “Are Key 
Obama Advisors in Tine with Neocon Hawks who wants to Attack in Iran.” The 
author is Robert Drefuss, a level headed leftish commentator.  He sketched in 
the  political backgrounds of advisers to Obama and concluded that “Tony Lake, 
UN Ambassador-designate Susan Rice, Tom Daschle, and Dennis Ross, along with 
leading Democratic hawks like Richard Holbrooke, close to Vice-President-elect 
Joe Biden or Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton -- have made common 
cause with war-minded think-tank hawks at the Washington Institute for Near East 
Policy (WINEP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and other hardline 
institutes.”
These Obama-hawks, Dreyfuss gloomily told his readers, reckon that talks with 
Iran about its nuclear program will fail. On the heels of this failure they urge 
“a kinetic action” in the form of a savage bombing campaign by the US Air Force.

Four more years of anxious articles about the impending attack on Iran? I’d 
rather read Piers Plowman again, the dullest work I ever had to trudge through 
when I read Eng Lit at Oxford. Criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy team are,if 
anything, outstripped by  gloom and indignation over his economic team. The 
economist  Michael Hudson complained here recently that Obama was meekly 
following the advice of banker and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, 
putting Rubin’s  protégés in key Obama administration posts: “Larry Summers, who 
as head of the World Bank forced privatization at give-away prices to 
kleptocrats; Geithner of the New York Fed; and a monetarist economist from 
Berkeley, as right-wing a university as Chicago. These are the protective 
guard-dogs of America’s vested interests.”

More mouldy cabbages are being hurled at Obama’s picks at the Pentagon, starting 
with the familiar visage of Robert Gates, already in occupation of the top job, 
having been put there by George Bush Jr, to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Winslow 
Wheeler, for many years a senor Republican staffer in Congress, has a solid 
reputation as one of the best-informed of all the observers of that vast sink 
hole of fraud and waste, the US Defense Department.

During Gates’ tenure, Wheeler complains in an interview by Andrew Cockburn here 
last Wednesday, “things have only gotten worse.  The budget’s going up faster 
than ever before in recent history; the size of our forces is going south; the 
equipment continues to get older.”

Wheeler says “the second tier of appointments that they’re talking about in the 
press for the Obama team are mostly holdovers from the Clinton era, when things 
were almost as bad as they were during the Bush era.  Most of the major hardware 
programs that are now coming a cropper as major cost and performance disasters 
were conceived during the Clinton era.  Things such as the Future Combat 
Systems, or  the Navy’s DDG 1000 Destroyer known as the Arsenal Ship and later 
the DDX Destroyer, spawned when Richard Danzig was Secretary of the Navy. 
Danzig is under active consideration to be deputy secretary of defense and 
Gates’ natural successor when Gates finishes whatever short timer term he has 
under Obama.  The F-22 fighter, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, it goes on, all 
these programs that are cost and performance disasters had their genesis during 
the Clinton era.”

Asked by Andrew about Obama’s National Security Advisor, Jim Jones, Wheeler 
replied tartly , “He is a man of great stature, physically and figuratively, in 
Washington.  He is a Washington ‘heavy’ but if you look at his record, nothing 
much ever happened.  Things went south in Afghanistan pretty rapidly when he was 
supreme commander of all Nato forces in Afghanistan.   When he was Commandant of 
the Marine Corps, a lot of the marines’ overpriced underperforming hardware 
programs, such as the V-22 [vertical takeoff troop transport plane] and the 
Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle were endorsed and continued happily along.  He 
seems to have been mostly a placeholder when he had these very senior and 
important positions.

In Jones’ favor I have heard that at some point in Bush time he lodged with 
Condoleezza Rice a report on Israeli conduct that was so harsh it had to be 
swiftly tossed to the shredder. I look forward to reports of a mano a mano 
between the vast Jones and the diminutive Emanuel.
One striking feature of these complaints is that if thethe many of  complainers 
had their suspicions about Obama during the campaign, they kept their mouths 
firmly shut. Across eight presidential campaigns, since Jimmy Carter’s 
successful run in 1976, I’ve never seen such collective determination by the 
liberal left to think only positive thoughts about a Democratic candidate. 
Indeed, some of the present fury may stem from a certain embarrassment at their 
own political naivety. In fairness to Obama, beyond the vaguely radical afflatus 
of his campaign rhetoric about “change”, Obama never concealed his true 
political stance, which is of the center-right. In every sense of the phrase, he 
can say to his left critics, “I told you so.” And indeed he did.

The obvious question is whether this chorus of political disillusion on the 
liberal left is of any political consequence. Obama is sensitive on the matter. 
He defended himself last week by saying that in these dire times Americans need 
to be comforted by the installation of familiar and respected figures in the new 
administration. The polls bear him out. The public is mostly happy with what it 
has seen thus far. The new President, Obama insisted, will be the man setting 
the new course.

In his salvoes against Obama’s awful economic team  Michael Hudson brought up 
one ominous parallel. Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, after eight years 
of Richard Nixon. The hopes of the liberal left were similarly high. Almost 
immediately Carter dashed their hopes with hawkish foreign policy appointments. 
Two years after Carter took over the Oval Office, Jim Ridgeway and I, working 
for the Village Voice,  went to  interview William Winpisinger, president of the 
Machinists’ Union and one of the most powerful labor leaders in America. We put 
a tape recorder on his desk and asked, “Is there anything President Carter could 
do to redeem himself in your eyes? Winpisinger eyed the tape recorder bleakly 
and said, “Die.”

A year later Carter was grimly fighting a liberal-left challenge to his 
re-nomination by the Democrats  for a second term. The challenger was Teddy 
Kennedy. Though Carter beat off the Kennedy threat, he was seriously weakened 
and lost his relection bid. One can surmise that one reason Obama has made 
Hillary Clinton Secretary of State is to head off a Kennedy-type challenge. The 
trouble with slogans like “change” is that they are like zeppelins. The wind can 
whistle out of their pretensions with dreadful speed.

But it would be foolishly premature to conjure up the possibility of serious 
left resistance emerging in any form that would be bothersome to Obama. All it 
will take for now will be a bone tossed out of the limo, in the form of  one or 
two halfways decent appointments on the enviro side. Nixon launched his green 
crusade (Earth Day, EPA, etc) in an effort to split the left and Obama could do 
the same. How about a “war” on global warming, with some version of the 
Roosevelt era’s  Civilian Conservation Corps waging “war”  on the fictive foe 
known as man-made global warming. As has often been pointed out, there were 
close similarities between the CCC and similar quasi-militarised bodies of this 
nature in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy...

--Alexander Cockburn <http://www.counterpunch.org/>