[Peace-discuss] Why Obama is scarier than W.

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I think Rall may be right. But the principal objection to the war in
Afghanistan is not that there's "no prospect of victory."  It's that it's an
international crime, an aggressive war for geopolitical control, that Obama
justifies with an even more ridiculous excuse than Bush used for aggression
against Iraq. And it's true that "Obama isn't our FDR" -- but he's not our
Mikhail Gorbachev, either: he's our Boris Yeltsin, who gave the public's assets
to the rich, with the urging of the Clinton administration. --CGE]

	ESSAY- Dour prez: Why Obama is scarier than W.
	By TED RALL
	Published January 29, 2009 in issue 0804 of the Hook

Dave Eggers preceded his memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" with
a section titled "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book," a brilliant
attempt to disarm the reader and preempt criticism. Among the warnings,
referring to chapter four: "The book thereafter is kind of uneven." (Disclosure:
Eggers edited my work at two magazines in the '90s.)

Barack Obama shares Eggers' talent for managing expectations.

"There will be false starts, there will be setbacks, there will be frustrations
and disappointments," Obama said upon his arrival in Washington. "I will make
some mistakes."

In other words, don't expect much.

The soaring optimistic rhetoric of the campaign ("yes we can") is no more,
replaced by the sober, string-synced cello strains of Yo Yo Ma. Also gone is
Obama's million-dollar smile. The Dour One is demanding patience.

And he's getting it, for now: "Most respondents [to the New York Times/CBS News
poll taken January 19th] said they thought it would take Mr. Obama two years or
more to deliver on campaign promises to improve the economy, expand health care
coverage and end the war in Iraq."

Setting the bar low seems to be working. Seventy-nine percent of Americans say
they're optimistic about the next four years under Obama.

Sad, pathetic Americans! Like a dog that's been beaten eight long years, they're
so psyched about the fact that their new master doesn't drool and speaks
coherent English that they'll follow him anywhere. The media is in love with The
One and so, therefore, is the public. No one questions him.

Frightening but true: Barack Obama is even more dangerous to liberal ideals than
George W. Bush. Obama, who didn't appoint a single liberal to a senior position,
has neutered the left. "Protesters, a fixture of every inauguration since
President Nixon's in 1973, were few and scattered on Tuesday as Barack Obama
assumed the presidency," reported the Times.

The antiwar types have thrown away their signs. The sight of the first black
president has the fair weather pacifists goo-goo-ga-gaing over a man who plans
to transfer U.S. occupation troops and the carnage they bring from Iraq to
Afghanistan.

No demonstrators in the streets. No reporters asking tough questions. A
political honeymoon based on nothing. Didn't we learn anything from 9/11, when
90 percent of Americans, and the media, and Congress, issued George W. Bush a
similar blank check?

People think things will be better four years from now, but there's little
reason for hope. America faces radical problems. Radical problems require
radical solutions. Unfortunately, Obama's proposals, and the moderates and
conservatives with whom he has filled his cabinet, are woefully inadequate to
the challenges at hand.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calculates that there's at least a
$2.1 trillion hole in the economy -- an "output gap" between production capacity
and consumers' ability to buy goods. Filling that hole would require direct
investment (like Obama's public works proposal) of at least $1.5 trillion.

But Obama's plan only contains $355 billion, of which only $136 billion would be
spent within the next two years. It's better than nothing, but not by much.
Obama wants to plug a gushing artery with a Band-Aid one- tenth the size of the
wound.

It's churlish to predict that Obama's approach won't work. But even Obama admits
it won't. He promises to create 4 million new jobs by 2011. But we're currently
losing 4 million jobs every five months.

If Obama delivers, 25 million Americans will have lost their jobs by 2011. (The
math differential is due to the fact that population growth increases the
workforce by 2.8 million jobs annually.) With unemployment figures like that, no
one will doubt that we're in a real Depression: breadlines, suicides, the whole bit.

Obama's order to close Guantánamo and the CIA's secret "black site" torture
prisons within a year is heartening. But as with his other initiatives, it
doesn't go far enough. The detainees should have been freed, paid a generous
compensation package, and received a formal apology by the U.S. government on
Day One of his Administration. Gitmo should have been shuttered immediately. All
the torture criminals from Bush to the U.S. Navy guards should have been thrown
in prison and put on trial.

Instead, Obama's goons (they're his now) will keep torturing the detainees for
at least another year. Some detainees may still be subjected to kangaroo courts.
And Obama's executive orders contain weasel words that let him take back
America's renewed commitment to Constitutional rights with the snap of a finger.
The orders, reports the Times, "could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the
CIA's detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential
order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another
top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured."

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration creeps who personally ordered the murder and
torture of innocents kidnapped by the military, including young children, will
not face prosecution.

During the campaign, Obama promised there would be "no more illegal wiretapping
of American citizens." He has since changed his mind. Obama will keep the
USA-Patriot Act. Habeas corpus, eliminated by the Military Commissions Act,
won't come back.

The biggest reason hope doesn't stand a chance is Afghanistan, where Obama plans
to send the soldiers he wants to pull out of Iraq. The international community,
which understands that the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had no more to do
with 9/11 than the war against Iraq, will not take kindly to this escalation.

Moreover, the war against Afghanistan is even less winnable than Iraq. At a time
when we can least afford foreign adventurism, Obama plans to pour billions of
dollars and thousands of lives into an Afghan charnel house with no prospect of
victory.

Bush faced energetic opposition. Obama, on the other hand, is adored by the very
people who should be shouting at him the loudest. Conservatives lost their
credibility by supporting Bush, leaving Republican voices out in the cold.

Give the man a chance? Not me. I've sized up him, his advisors and their plans,
and already found them sorely wanting. It won't take long, as Obama's failures
prove the foolishness of Americans' blind trust in him.

Obama isn't our FDR. He's our Mikhail Gorbachev: likeable, intelligent,
well-meaning, and ultimately doomed by his insistence on being reasonable during
unreasonable times.

~

Ted Rall's most recent book is Wake Up, You're Liberal! How We Can Take America
Back from the Right (Soft Skull Press).

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