[Peace-discuss] Obama's war, bailouts must be opposed

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From Chris Floyd. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at 
www.chris-floyd.com. --CGE]


...[On Friday, March 27] Barack Obama announced, with a flourish of falsehoods 
and fearmongering, his grand plans to escalate the "Af-Pak" War.

Not that I was surprised by any of it: both the truth-abusing rhetoric and the 
war-expanding intentions have been hallmarks of Team Obama's Afghanistan 
policies since the early days of his presidential campaign. And Obama, eager to 
establish his tough-guy cojones, was killing civilians in Pakistan and ordering 
up an Afghan surge just as soon as he climbed into the Imperial cockpit. His 
much-vaunted "strategic review" was simply a bureaucratic exercise to determine 
how best to tweak and refine the policies already adopted by the Bush 
Administration and its military managers -- all of whom were of course retained 
by Obama. Again, this was to be expected. After all, "continuity" has been his 
watchword -- or rather, it became his watchword right after he was swept into 
office as the self-proclaimed embodiment of the public's desperate longing for 
change.

Even so, to see the expansion of the Af-Pak War finally, formally promulgated, 
and to realize what this really means, not in terms of the ludicrous political 
theater of Washington and the media, not in the war-game fantasies of 
think-tankers and armchair warriors, but in the actual costs -- the death and 
suffering of thousands of innocent people, the ruinous chaos and the violent 
hatred engendered, the massive financial corruption and gargantuan debt added to 
our already corrupt and bankrupt system, the further coarsening and 
brutalization and militarization of our society, and again, because it bears 
repeating, the physical and emotional destruction of countless human beings 
whose only crime was to be born in a region targeted by the Great Gamesters of 
the world, the warlords in turbans and those in Brooks Brothers suits, the 
gangsters in the alleys and in the corridors of power -- this is a bitter and 
sickening thing. And no amount of foreknowledge or cynicism makes it any easier 
to bear. The day it gets easier, the day your cynicism makes you shrug off the 
horror -- "So what else is new?" -- is the day your soul dies.

The wagon train with its rotting cargo keeps lurching on. A change of drivers 
has not meant a change in direction. As Tom Englehardt points out, in both 
foreign policy and on the economic front, the Obama Administration is trying 
frantically to preserve an imperial system that is cracking under the weight of 
its own immoral excesses, its own arrogance and willful ignorance. But owing to 
the latter, their only solution is to do more of the same things that have 
plunged the system into severe crisis.

In fact, the domestic side of their efforts is even more radical, more shocking 
than Obama's dull-witted "continuity" in Terror War. The new administration is 
openly transferring trillions of dollars to a small core of financial elites, in 
effect placing the rest of the country into a state of economic peonage to these 
remote and unaccountable overlords -- who have, astonishingly, used the fear and 
suffering created by their own actions as an opportunity to take their 
domination of society to even greater heights. What Obama and his economic team 
are abetting is, as Simon Johnson and others have noted, nothing less than an 
oligarchic coup d'etat. I lived through one of those in Russia in the 1990s, and 
it was not a pretty sight. And again, because the scale of the American power 
structure is so much greater, so too will be the far-reaching, long-lasting 
consequences of this coup.

I've never been a starry-eyed idealist. I've never preached the counsel of 
seeking the perfect at the expense of the good. And I've never believed that any 
single politician or administration could take office and magically transform 
the nature of the American empire overnight. I acknowledge the aptness of the 
metaphor used by many of Obama's defenders: the image of a sea captain, beset by 
virulent opponents on the bridge, struggling to turn a vast ocean liner in the 
opposite direction, in the midst of a raging storm. That would indeed take a 
long time, and tremendous effort, and require stoic patience from the passengers.

But that is not what is happening. The long, hard, thankless effort that it 
would take to roll back the bloated global empire of bases and curtail the power 
of the oligarchy (for you can't do one without the other) has not even begun. 
Obama is not trying to wrest the ship of state toward a new direction; he is 
deliberately and willingly continuing on the same disastrous, destructive course 
as before. Every day carries us further and further away from the shore, and 
makes any effort to reverse course that much harder -- if indeed, it is still 
possible at all.

[Full article at http://www.counterpunch.org/]