[Peace-discuss] Obama…

[Morton K. Brussel]

This is a comment upon Norman's Solomon's piece, Freeing up resources  
for more war…

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/25

which parallels my own response to Obama's speech last night.

Ephraim February 25th, 2009 9:01 am
Brief and to the point. As a skeptic of Obama's alleged progressivism  
from the beginning of his run for presidency, I must admit I was  
impressed with his speech to Congress last night. Not that he turned  
me around, but it was his best address ever, IMO. He struck some  
fairly "progressive"-sounding chords, even if the word has mostly been  
drained of meaning over the last few years. Still, Obama's signature  
vagueness on policy direction was anything but absent. But there were  
those notes of potential change on the near horizon, nonetheless.

But they're all neutralized precisely because of what Solomon says in  
this piece. He fully intends to live up to his campaign promise of  
escalating the US incursion/invasion/bombing/occupation and all other  
manifestations of US imperial military might and will in Afghanistan.  
He will not leave this keg of dynamite alone; he's got the match and  
by god he's going to strike it.

He apparently has faith that all the scare words (Al-Qaeda, terrorism,  
Taliban) still have enough currency to fool a majority of gullible  
Americans into supporting this guaranteed catastrophic failure, just  
as Bush gambled they would in 2003. The fact that Iraq is the most  
disastrous escapade this country ever launched is utterly lost on this  
"brilliant" president. He still nourishes the fantasy that "the surge  
(in Iraq) was successful beyond our wildest dreams," and desperately  
wants to prove as successful a "wartime president" as his magnificent  
and valiant predecessor. He just knows he can win in Afghanistan the  
way Bush won in Iraq.

There probably aren't ten people in the world who truly believe the US  
can accomplish what Obama thinks he can in Afghanistan, especially by  
military force. How can someone be so "smart" and unutterably stupid  
at the same time? With that degree of delusion, how can anyone think  
this guy is going to deliver the goods on healing our shattered  
economy? He'll bankrupt us even further with his own personal military  
adventure, if it's even possible to go more bankrupt than we are now.  
He'll kill countless Afghani civilians trying to exterminate the evil  
terrorists, in reality only recruiting more to their fanatical cause,  
just as Bush's war has done. We've killed about 1.3 million Iraqis,  
drove another 4 or 5 million into exile, and successfully destroyed  
the country. (A dream come true, apparently, for Obama.) The fact that  
he cannot understand this, or doesn't care, makes him just another  
wanna-be criminal American president, in a tragically long line of them.

And here I was thinking maybe there would be some "hope" for this guy,  
after that stirring speech. Silly me.
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