[Peace-discuss] Oppose Obama's imperialism

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Against Obama
	By Alexander Cockburn
	This article appeared in the
	November 10, 2008, edition of The Nation.

A climate of intolerance? An ugly mood at the McCain/Palin rallies? Ever alert 
to the brownshirt menace, liberals read press reports from Ohio and Wisconsin 
with a *frisson*. So where have they been these past few months? Try going into 
a typical progressive household to make an argument against Obama and for a 
Nader vote. A couple of lifelong radical friends of mine whisper to me that in 
their homes and workplaces they've given up straight talk about Obama altogether 
and feel free to talk, sotto voce, only in public parks.

In these last days I've been scraping around, trying to muster a single positive 
reason to encourage a vote for Obama. Please note my accent on the positive, 
since the candidate himself has couched his appeal in this idiom. Why vote *for* 
Obama, as opposed to *against* the Palin-Wurzelbacher ticket?

Obama invokes change. Yet never has the dead hand of the past had a "reform" 
candidate so firmly by the windpipe. Is it possible to confront America's 
problems without talking about the arms budget, now entirely out of control? The 
Pentagon is spending more than at any point since the end of World War II. In 
"real dollars" the $635 billion appropriated in fiscal 2007 is 5 percent above 
the previous all-time high, reached in 1952. Depending on how you count them, 
the Empire has somewhere between 700 and 1,000 overseas bases. Obama wants to 
enlarge the armed services by 90,000. He pledges to escalate the US war in 
Afghanistan; to attack Pakistan's sovereign territory if it obstructs any 
unilateral US mission to kill Osama bin Laden; and to wage a war against terror 
in a hundred countries, creating for this purpose a new international 
intelligence and law enforcement "infrastructure" to take down terrorist 
networks. A fresh start? Where does this differ from Bush's commitment to 
Congress on September 20, 2001, to an ongoing "war on terror" against "every 
terrorist group of global reach" and "any nation that continues to harbor or 
support terrorism"?

Obama's liberal defenders comfort themselves with the thought that "he had to 
say that to get elected." He didn't. After eight years of Bush, Americans are 
receptive to reassessing America's imperial role. Obama has shunned this 
opportunity. If elected he will be prisoner of his promise that on his watch 
Afghanistan will not be lost, nor the white man's burden shirked.

Whatever drawdown of troops in Iraq that does take place in the event of Obama's 
victory will be a brief hiccup amid the blare and thunder of fresh "resolve." In 
the event of Obama's victory, the most immediate consequence overseas will most 
likely be brusque imperial reassertion. Already Joe Biden, the shopworn poster 
boy for Israeli intransigence and cold war hysteria, is yelping stridently about 
the new administration's "mettle" being tested in the first six months by the 
Russians and their surrogates.

After eight years of unrelenting assault on constitutional liberties by Bush and 
Cheney, public and judicial enthusiasm for tyranny has waned. Obama has 
preferred to stand with Bush and Cheney. In February, seeking a liberal profile 
in the primaries, Obama stood against warrantless wiretapping. His support for 
liberty did not survive its second trimester; he aborted it with a vote for 
warrantless wiretapping. The man who voted to reaffirm the Patriot Act declared 
that "the ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United 
States is a vital counterterrorism tool."

Every politician, good or bad, is an ambitious opportunist. But beneath this 
topsoil, the ones who make a constructive dent on history have some bedrock of 
consistency, of fidelity to some central idea. In Obama's case, this "idea" is 
the ultimate distillation of identity politics: the idea of his blackness. Those 
who claim that if he were white he would be cantering effortlessly into the 
White House do not understand that without his most salient physical 
characteristic Obama would be seen as a second-tier senator with unimpressive 
credentials. As a political organizer of his own advancement, Obama is a wonder. 
But I have yet to identify a single uplifting intention to which he has remained 
constant if it has presented the slightest risk to his advancement. Summoning 
all the optimism at my disposal, I suppose we could say he has not yet had 
occasion to offend two important constituencies and adjust his relatively decent 
stances on immigration and labor-law reform. Public funding of his campaign? A 
commitment made becomes a commitment betrayed, just as on warrantless 
eavesdropping. His campaign treasury is now a vast hogswallow that, if it had 
been amassed by a Republican, would be the topic of thunderous liberal complaint.

In substantive terms Obama's run has been the negation of almost every decent 
progressive principle, a negation achieved with scarcely a bleat of protest from 
the progressives seeking to hold him to account. The Michael Moores stay silent. 
Abroad, Obama stands for imperial renaissance. He has groveled before the Israel 
lobby and pandered to the sourest reflexes of the cold war era. At home he has 
crooked the knee to bankers and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal 
companies, the nuclear lobby, the big agricultural combines. He has been 
fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing the powerful.

So no, this is not an exciting or liberating moment in America's politics such 
as was possible after the Bush years. If you want a memento of what could be 
exciting, I suggest you go to the website of the Nader-Gonzalez campaign and 
read its platform, particularly on popular participation and initiative. Or read 
the portions of Libertarian Bob Barr's platform on foreign policy and 
constitutional rights. Cynthia McKinney is now making nutty claims about 5,000 
post-Katrina executions; otherwise I'd include her.

Do you really want to be on the same side as Alan Dershowitz, Colin Powell and 
Christopher Hitchens?

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081110/cockburn>

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