[Peace-discuss] Mutiny on the Obounty?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The Clinton/Obama rivalry of course never went away, and Biden has always been 
a useful idiot, but Cockburn here seems to think that Obama is more challenged 
than perhaps he is.  His foreign policy instincts have always been quite 
conventional.  Only briefly was it to his advantage to appear otherwise. --CGE]


	The Biden and Clinton Mutinies
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Time bombs tossed seemingly casually in the past month by his vice president and 
his secretary of state disclose president Obama, in the dawn of his first term, 
  already the target of carefully meditated onslaughts by senior members of his 
own cabinet.

At the superficial level Obama is presiding over an undisciplined 
administration; on a  more realistic and  sinister construction, he is facing 
mutiny, publicly conducted by two people who only a year ago were claiming that 
their qualifications to be in the Oval Office were far superior to those of the 
junior senator from Illinois.

The great danger to Obama posed by Biden's and Clinton's  "time bombs" (a 
precisely correct description if we call them political, not diplomatic time 
bombs) is not international confusion and ridicule over what precisely are the 
US government’s policies, but a direct onslaught on his presidency by a domestic 
Israeli lobby that is so out of control that it renders ridiculous Obama’s puny 
attempt to stop settlements--or to curb Israeli aggression in any other way.

Take Joe Biden. Three weeks ago he gave Israel the green light to bomb Iran, 
only to be swiftly corrected by his boss.  At the time it seemed yet 
another,somewhat comical mile marker in a lifetime of gaffes, perpetrated in the 
cause of self-promotion and personal political advantage.

But Biden’s subsequent activities invite a darker construction.   In the 
immediate aftermath of Obama’s Moscow visit, the air still soft with honeyed 
words about a new era of trust and cooperation, Biden headed for Ukraine and 
Georgia, harshly ridiculing Russia as an economic basket case with no future. In 
Tbilisi he told the Georgian parliament  that the U.S. would continue helping 
Georgia “to modernize” its military and that Washington “fully supports” 
Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO and would help Tbilisi meet the alliance’s 
standards. This elicited a furious reaction from Moscow, pledging sanctions 
against any power rearming Georgia.

Georgia could play a vital, enabling role, in the event that Israel decides to 
attack Iran’s nuclear complex. The flight path from Israel to Iran is 
diplomatically and geographically challenging. On the other hand, Georgia is 
perfectly situated  as the take-off point for any such raid. Israel has been 
heavily involved in supplying and training Georgia’s armed forces. President 
Saakashvili has boasted that his Defense Minister, Davit Kezerashvili and also 
Temur Yakobashvili , the minister responsible for negotiations over South 
Ossetia, lived in Israel before moving to Georgia, adding  “Both war and peace 
are in the hands of Israeli Jews."

On the heels of Biden’s shameless pandering in Tbilisi, Secretary of State 
Clinton took herself off to Thailand for an international confab with Asian 
leaders and let drop to a tv chat show that “a nuclear Iran could be contained 
by a U.S. ‘defense umbrella,’” actually a nuclear defense umbrella for Israel 
and for Egypt and Saudi Arabia too.

The Israel lobby has been promoting the idea of a US “nuclear umbrella” for some 
years, with one of its leading exponents being Dennis Ross, now in charge of 
Middle Eastern policy at Obama’s National Security Council. In her campaign last 
year  Clinton flourished the notion as an example of the sort of policy 
initiative that set her apart from that novice in foreign affairs, Barack Obama.

 From any rational point of view the “nuclear umbrella” is an awful idea, 
redolent with all the gimcrack theology of the high cold war era, about “first 
strike”, “second strike”, “stable deterrence” ,“controlled escalation” and 
“mutual assured destruction”, used to sell US escalations in nuclear arms 
production, from Kennedy  and the late Robert McNamara(“the Missile Gap”) to 
Reagan (“Star Wars”).

Indeed, as one Pentagon veteran remarked to me earlier this week, “the 
Administration's whole nuclear stance is turning into a cheesy rerun of the Cold 
  War and Mutually Assured Destruction, all based on a horrible exaggeration of 
one or two Iranian nuclear bombs that the Persians may be too incompetent to 
build and most certainly are too incompetent to deliver.”

The Biden and Clinton "foreign" policy is: 1) to recreate the same old Cold War 
(with a new appendage, the US versus Iran nuclear confrontation) for the same 
old reasons: to pump up domestic defense spending; and 2) to continue sixty 
years of supporting Israeli imperialism for the same reasons that every 
president from Harry to Dubya (perhaps barring Ike) did so: to corner Israel 
lobby money and votes. Regarding the latter, Obama did the same by grabbing the 
Chicago-based Crown and Pritzker family money very early in his campaign and by 
making Rahm Emanuel his very first appointment (the two are hardly unrelated).

So right from the start Obama was already an Israel lobby fellow traveler. The 
Mitchell appointment and the toothless blather about settlements were simply 
cosmetic,  bones tossed to the increasing proportion of the American electorate 
that's grossed out by the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs from the Holy Land. 
Obama does have a coherent strategy: keep the defense money flowing and 
increasing, but without making so much noise as the older generation did about 
ancient Cold War enemies (e.g. Russia and Cuba).  The F-22 -- to date, the one 
and only presidential issue on which he's shown any toughness at all -- is in no 
sense a departure from keeping the money flowing, since he is indeed increasing 
the defense budget, in part by using the F-22 cancellation to push spending on 
the even worse F-35 and to hide his acquiescence to all the other pork in the 
Congressional defense budget.

The window for any  new president to impose a decisive change in foreign policy 
comes in the first three months, before opposition has time to solidify. Obama 
squandered that opportunity, stocking his foreign policy team with tarnished 
players such as Ross. As the calculated indiscretions of Biden and Clinton 
suggest, not to mention the arrogance of Netanyahu and his political associates, 
the window of opportunity has  closed.

Would it have been that hard to signal a change in course? Not really. Obama 
could have excited the world by  renouncing  the Bush administration’s 
assertion, in the “National Defense Strategy of the United States” in 2005, of 
the  right and intention of the United States to preëmptively attack any country 
“at the time, place, and in the manner of our choosing.”  As  William Polk, the 
State Department’s middle east advisor in the Kennedy era, wrote last year: “As 
long as this remains a valid statement of American policy, the Iranian 
government would be foolish not to seek a nuclear weapon.”

But Obama, surrounded with Clinton-era veterans of NATO expansionism and, as his 
Accra speech indicated, hobbled with an impeccably conventional view of how the 
world works, is rapidly being overwhelmed by the press of events. He’s bailed 
out the banks. He’s transferred war from Iraq to Afghanistan. The big lobbies 
know they have him on the run.

Hence Biden and Clinton's mutinies, conducted on behalf of the Israel lobby and 
designed to seize administration policy as Obama's popularity weakens. When the 
results of the latest Rasmussen presidential poll were published, showing 
Obama's declining numbers, there were news reports of cheering in Tel Aviv. And 
remember two useful guiding principles: first, it is impossible to underestimate 
the vanity of politicians, particularly of Joe Biden. Maybe he secretly 
entertains some mad notion of challenging Obama in 2012, propelled by Israel 
Lobby money withheld from Obama. Maybe Bill is reminding HRC that he reached the 
White House in 1992 partly because the Israel lobby turned against George Bush 
Sr. Second principle: there is no such thing as foreign policy, neither in 
democratic governments nor in dictatorships. As Thalheimer’s Law* decrees. All 
policy is domestic.

* I was introduced to Thalheimer’s Law by his nephew, Pierre Sprey, himself a 
valued friend and advisor to CounterPunch on matters ranging from statistics to 
weaponry (he was one of the designers of the A-10 and F-16 before the aerospace 
profiteers got their mitts on them) to high-end sound. (Go to his website, 
www.mapleshaderecords.com/) Pierre writes, “Dr. Siegfried Thalheimer  was a 
brilliant political historian (and art historian), much published in Germany and 
France. Among many extraordinarily interesting books, he wrote the finest 
history of the Dreyfus Affair in print--one of the very few that makes clear 
that anti-Semitism had nothing to do with the heart of the affair, showing 
instead that it was, in fact, one of the earliest military-industrial-political 
conspiracies of the modern era.”

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