[Peace-discuss] Chris Floyd on Obama's Prague dreck

[C. G. Estabrook]

	April 7, 2009
	Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan
	Hard Rain Keeps Falling
	By CHRIS FLOYD

"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it." -- Bob Dylan

While the usual gaggle of sycophants and media hive-minders -- along with some 
ordinarily perspicacious analysts -- tell us that Barack Obama literally changed 
the course of human history by disgorging a great load of thrice-chewed cud 
about nuclear disarmament in Prague this week, the high-tech drone war the great 
hero of peace is waging inside the sovereign territory of America's ally, 
Pakistan, is helping drive tens of thousands of people from their homes and 
killing civilians almost daily.

I.

Obama's Prague speech was a bold, creative, world-shaking, epochal address whose 
full import will only be understood many years hence by future historians, 
declared no less than Juan Cole. But the good professor seems to have mislaid 
his laser pointer -- the sharp-focused beam that just a week ago skewered Obama 
for his outright lies and Cheneyesque manipulations in announcing his 
"comprehensive strategy" to escalate and expand the "Af-Pak War". Indeed, just 
two days before Obama's pseudo-epiphany in Prague, Cole was accurately 
delineating the folly and falsehoods permeating Obama's Afghanistan policies.

Yet like so many, Cole seemed dazzled by Obama's nuclear boilerplate, hailing 
the president as "among the more creative and bold leaders the world has seen in 
the past half-century." (Admittedly, that is a mighty low bar.) Cole even found 
some reason to hope that that Obama would follow the logic of his disarmament 
rhetoric and somehow force Israel to give up its arsenal of nuclear weapons. But 
there was nothing in Obama's speech that had not been said dozens if not 
hundreds of times before by American presidents from both parties, going back 
decades: We pledge "to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear 
weapons." Nuclear proliferation must be stopped. Rogue states can't have nuclear 
bombs. We will work with the Russians to reduce our stockpiles. What president 
has ever said otherwise? Has there ever been a U.S. president since the atomic 
evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who has not made an impassioned plea to 
rid the world of these terrible weapons?

And of course, the brute fact is that the United States is bound by solemn 
treaty to work toward the reduction and eventual elimination of its nuclear 
arsenal. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obliges the government of the 
United States "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures" to 
bring about complete nuclear disarmament in the world. Obama's "bold," "new" 
vision is, quite simply, part of his job description; or rather, a legal 
requirement for his office.

But what celebrants dazzled by Obama's assertion that he is "committed" (that 
great weasel-word of the high and mighty) to doing what he is obligated to do 
failed to notice -- or at least failed to highlight -- were Obama's other 
well-worn bromides in the speech: the ones where he makes the ritual declaration 
of America's continuing readiness to whip out the nukes at a moment's notice -- 
and to carry on with the decades-long, ever-expanding boondoggle of the "missile 
defense shield." As The Times reports:

"Mr Obama said: 'Make no mistake: as long as these weapons exist, we will 
maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and 
guarantee that defence to our allies.'

"He added that the continued threat from Iran, as well as the North Korean test 
launch, underlined the need for the missile shield that the US, much to the 
dismay of Moscow, plans to base in the Czech Republic and Poland."

In other words, as long as any other nation has nuclear weapons, the United 
States will keep its own nukes primed and ready and rarin' to go. And of course, 
as long as the United States retains its weapons, then other nations will also 
keep their arsenals, in the never-to-be-discounted event that they might become 
an "adversary" of the United States or one of its allies. This neat little 
dynamic means that we will never see "the peace and security of a world without 
nuclear weapons" -- no matter how many world-shaking, epoch-making speeches are 
delivered in the shadow of Kafka's Castle.

The "missile shield" is of course another spur to nuclear proliferation, as the 
United States steadily rings the globes with an advanced weapons system that can 
just as easily be used for offensive operations as for its putative "defense" 
function. Come to think of it, it is actually only effective as an offensive 
system, because, despite decades of war pork and rigged tests, the missile 
"shield" is singularly unable to shoot down incoming missiles. Again, if some 
nuclear-armed nation was installing such a system on your frontier, you might 
want to hang on to your own nukes too -- or get some if you didn't have any yet.

Epochal epiphanies and kairotic events should be made of sterner stuff. That old 
hard rain is still looming on the horizon...

[Full article at <http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd04072009.html>. It's a 
salutary corrective to the liberals' increasingly frantic search for things to 
praise in Obama's sugar-coated warmongering.  --CGE]