[Peace-discuss] Obama's cynical task

[C. G. Estabrook]

OBAMA'S CYNICAL TASK.

      "Obama announces new Vietnam War memorial project. Speaking from  
the Vietnam War Memorial, President Barack Obama criticizes treatment  
of Vietnam veterans and announces a 13-year memorial program to  
commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the start of the war..."

Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan, the anti-war movement in  
America looks remarkably similar to what it was in 1972 – ten years  
after the US invaded South Vietnam. In each case, more than two-thirds  
of the American public oppose the war, but the press and ‘educated  
opinion’ – hence the ideological institutions, notably the  
universities – support it. Our rulers’ task, in cases 40 years apart,  
is therefore to make sure that democracy is ineffective.

The American ascendency is in fact more effective at doing that now  
than they were then: they learnt something from the earlier  
experience. (See, e.g., Michael Crozier et al., The Crisis of  
Democracy [1975] – the crisis being that allowing democracy in the US  
would interfere with elite plans.) But they also learnt that the US  
public will not allow things like the carpet-bombing in Vietnam: note  
the secrecy (from the US public of course – they’re not secret from  
Afghans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Yemenis et al.) of Obama’s drone attacks.

There are other differences. The wars are very different: Vietnam was  
not important to the US except as a demonstration war – an  
illustration that countries are not to be allowed to develop  
independently, without coordinating their economies with US control.  
(And the US established the point by killing four million Asians,  
despite those who claim the US lost in Vietnam: its complete war aims  
were not achieved, but the important point was made clear to all –  
look at the SE Asian economies today.)

Afghanistan (“Pipelinistan,” as Pepe Escobar says) is much more  
important to the US elite than Vietnam ever was. It’s the keystone of  
the region that the US State Department in 1945 said contained “the  
world’s greatest material prize” – Mideast oil. Today the US  
government is threatening, invading, and occupying countries from  
North Africa to the Indian subcontinent, and from Central Asia to the  
Horn of Africa – a vast circle with a 2,000-mile radius – the Greater  
Middle East. (The US military calls it “Central Command.”) Control and  
not just access to those energy resources is what the US government  
demands: the US in fact imports very little oil from the Mideast, but  
control gives the US government an unparalleled advantage over its oil- 
hungry rivals in Europe and Asia. We’re killing people in the Mideast  
and North Africa because China needs oil, and our government wants to  
control where they get it. Our government says that we’re conducting  
these vastly expensive wars to stop terrorism and protect civilians;  
but it’s obvious that, instead, we’re killing civilians and creating  
terrorists.

Finally, the US is a very different country today. In 1972 it was a  
wealthy and prosperous society, with a self-confident middle class.  
Forty years of Neoliberal counter-attack to “the Sixties” have seen  
wages and standards of living stagnate or decline, even before the  
crisis of 2007/8 – out of which the rich 1% prospered and the 99%  
declined even further.

And in these circumstances, the US population is subject to the  
greatest propaganda manipulation in history, because of the failure of  
US propaganda in the 1970s, when 70% of Americans saw the Vietnam war  
as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake.” In his My  
Struggle (1925/6), “Adolph Hitler suggested that the Germans lost the  
First World War because they could not match Anglo-American propaganda  
achievements, and he vowed that next time Germany would be ready. It  
had a big impact on future developments” [Noam Chomsky].

Barack Obama wrote in 'The Audacity of Hope' that “the greatest  
casualty of that [Vietnam] war was the bond of trust between the  
American people and their government.” (Paul Street, who quotes the  
remark, comments, “as if the deaths of millions of Indochinese and  
58,000 U.S. GIs were secondary and as if popular American skepticism  
towards the designs of the U.S. foreign policy establishment isn’t a  
sign of democratic health.”) Obama sees his job accurately as to  
restore that “trust between the American people and their government”  
in regard to his war-making as well as his exploitative economic  
policy – although his account of the war is a lie.

The first task of the anti-war movement today is to overcome its co- 
option by the Democrats in the elections of 2006 and 2008, and dispel  
the propaganda fog of the Obama administration. Obama’s killing in the  
Mideast and Africa is more widespread, efficient, and brutal than  
Bush’s ever was, but the policy remains what it has been for more than  
a generation.  The anti-war movement must make that clear to the  
American people – and that it’s being done in our name.

--CGE
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