[Peace-discuss] The good Obama...

[C. G. Estabrook]

 From <http://www.counterpunch.org/>:

[Gareth Porter argued] on the CounterPunch site last Wednesday  that Obama was 
boxed in by an alliance of Gates and Secretary of State Clinton plus McChrystal 
and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the  Joint Chiefs of Staff,  in “a textbook 
demonstration of how the national security apparatus ensures that its policy 
preference on issues of military force prevail in the White House.”

Though Porter makes a decent case, this is giving too much comfort to those 
disconsolate but ever hopeful liberals arguing that there really is a “good 
Obama” battling away against the darker forces. In a larger time-frame, if 
anyone boxed himself in on Afghanistan it was Obama who spent a lot of the 
campaign last year seeking to deflect McCain’s charges that he was a quitter on 
Iraq, by proclaiming that America’s true battlefield lay in Afghanistan...

In the wake of the speech – particularly after polls showing that it had failed 
to increase prowar sentiment -  the Democrats were glum, well aware that they 
will be saddled with an unpopular war through the 2010 midterm elections and 
that Obama will unhesitatingly turn to Republicans in Congress to get the 
necessary vote for the money to finance the widening war. From the left came 
pledges to revive the antiwar movement, dormant these past two years.

There are hurt cries from prominent pwogs such as Tom Hayden who now vows he 
will strip the  Obama sticker off his car. Maybe so.  Our sense here at 
CounterPunch is that Lady Macbeth would get those damned spots off her hands far 
quicker that American progressives will purge themselves of Obamaphilia.

At least the American political landscape is offering some pleasing spectacles. 
  On Wednesday came tidings of a right-left alliance in Congress, challenging 
the reappointment of Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal 
Reserve, a slap in the face not only for Bernanke but for Obama...