[Peace-discuss] Obama & the bait-and-switch Democrats

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and ... an invasion of Pakistan."

	Obama, The Prince Of Bait-And-Switch
	July 24, 2008
	By John Pilger

On 12 July, the London Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a 
complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail 
his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also 
described the "high drama" and "meticulously practised routine" of evacuating 
another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, 
"saving a life took precedence over [their] security". Alongside this was a 
report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that "47 civilians, most 
of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding 
party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday".

Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public. I 
interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six 
children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. 
There was no "enemy" nearby. I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared 
in a fireball caused by another "precision" bomb. Inside were nine people - his 
wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband. 
Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes: 
"Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It 
didn't matter. It was of no interest."

A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was 
discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties are a 
"coalition" speciality. At least four of them have been obliterated - at Mazar 
and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including 
the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc 
Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism 
that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost 
everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the 
British and American military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This 
is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than 
all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. "The most frequently used bombs," the 
Air Force Times reports, "are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided . . ." 
Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, 
might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America's and Britain's puppet, has 
said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a 
resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA's payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W Bush's 
former spokesman Scott McClellan has called "complicit enablers" - journalists 
who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a 
"good war", the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours 
the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a 
bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is 
ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, 
an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more 
bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological 
machine that transcends the loss of electoral power - because their 
collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, 
"bait-and-switch" Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write of Obama that "when it comes to international affairs, he will 
be a huge improvement on Bush" demonstrate the same wilful naivety that backed 
the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton - and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late 
Hugo Young in 1997, "ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values' . . . there 
are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind 
might range in search of a better Britain . . ."

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack 
Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is 
irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer 
squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped 
unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

From: 	Z Space - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives

URL: 	http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3563