[Peace-discuss] Ten Years After: I'd Love to Change the World...

[C G Estabrook]

[I’ve recently come across a piece I wrote for an independent journal at Notre Dame at the time of Obama’s election, in 2008. 
The theme is the continuity of US government crimes, domestic and foreign, regardless of a seemingly transformative presidential election. 
I think that theme is still apropos.]

CEREMONIES IN A DARK YOUNG MAN: THE INAUGURATION IS NOT A NEW BEGINNING
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Can’t we hear what they’re saying?  The Democrats elected to Congress and the Presidency in this autumn's election have made it clear that they intend to dispense more public money to the richest people in this country via "bailouts" -- and to kill more people in an expanded "war on terrorism."  These were of course also the intentions of the outgoing administration.  The new administration has simply added a certain ecumenical quality to its predecessor's policies by being staffed with right-wing Democrats from the Clinton administration, from Rahm Emanuel to Hillary Clinton.

The president-elect's so-called security team consists of Mrs. Clinton (whose views on foreign policy were said during the primaries to be antithetical to Obama's) at the State Department, Robert Gates (an apparatchik and fixer since the Reagan administration, the real administrator of the Bush war policies since the eclipse of the Neocons) at Defense, and James Jones (ex-commandant of the Marine Corps and close friend of John McCain) as National Security Advisor. It's a line-up of supporters of aggressive war -- the supreme international crime, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal.

From the point of view of the promoters of America's war with the Middle East, that's not bad for a candidate who campaigned on being "against this war from the beginning" and was able to mislead and neutralize the US antiwar movement. Remember that the largest anti-war demonstrations in history occurred between the US attack on Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and the US invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003.

Claiming to be against the Iraq war in order to defraud the anti-war movement was the policy of the Democratic party in the election of 2006, when all admit that they were given control of Congress especially to bring the war to an end.  But the Democrats have always supported the general US policy in the Middle East, of which the Iraq war was a part.  Recently they -- and Obama -- have simply pretended that they didn't. And it worked.

WAR ON 'TERRORISM' -- OR THE MIDDLE EAST?

The US political system, particularly the Democrats, have worked hard to prevent an understanding -- and even any public discussion -- of the war that the US is carrying on this winter and into the coming year in the Middle East.  The new administration will continue to present it (falsely) as a "war on terrorism."

It is instead an imperialist war to control Middle East energy resources, a cornerstone of US policy for decades, in which there has been no change.  The US goal in every administration for half a century has been to secure by means of the control of Middle East oil and natural gas what senior Obama foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (who was National Security Advisor thirty years ago) calls "indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region." Those economies in Europe and northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are the real rivals to US economic hegemony, and the control of energy resources gives the US the whip-hand.

The theatres of this war stretch from the Mediterranean to the subcontinent (as we've seen in the Mumbai attacks), and from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa.  (There was even some speculation that the Mumbai attacks were connected to the Indian navy's attack on Somalian pirates, themselves a response to American devastation of Somalia; they were in any case surely prompted by the desire to disrupt the US-supported rapprochement between Pakistan and India, against the resistance to US domination of "AfPak," as they say in Washington.)   As the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war of the 1960s-70s spread murder and environmental desolation across SE Asia, so the Clinton-Bush-Obama war of the current decade involves all of SW Asia and environs -- an area far more important to the US than SE Asia ever was.

In spite of the hundreds of thousands of people our government has recently killed in SW Asia, and the increase in killing planned for the coming year, we still have a long way to go before we begin to equal the bloodbath we visited on SE Asia (because the South Vietnamese refused to follow orders and install the government that we had picked out for them).  The Clinton and Bush administrations each killed about a million people in SW Asia, but perhaps four million were killed by the US government in SE Asia; so far only about 5,000 Americans have been sent to die in SW Asia -- 50,000 were killed in SE Asia. So, on form, there is plenty of room on the upside for killing in the coming years of the decade...

Noam Chomsky says, "With regard to the Middle East, policy has been quite stable since World War II, when Washington recognized that Middle East oil supplies are 'a stupendous source of strategic power' and 'one of the greatest material prizes in world history.' That remains true ... there is, currently, no substantial basis for expecting any significant change under a new administration with regard to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, or any other crucial issue involving the Middle East."  (And Obama's discussion of Israel and the oppression of the Palestinians during the campaign  "leaves us with nothing except his fervent professions of love for Israel and dismissal of Palestinian concerns." )

FORTY YEARS ON

The presidential election that the election of 2008 most closely resembles is that of 1968.  In each case, a party that had controlled the presidency for two terms was waging an unpopular war.  (Almost three-quarters of  Americans disapproved of the US government's policy in Vietnam in 1968, about the same percentage who disapprove of its policy in Iraq today.)  And in each case, the election went to the other major party (Republicans in 1968, Democrats in 2008) -- in substantially less than a landslide -- after they fielded an ambiguous anti-war candidate. (Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate in 1968, said that he had "a secret plan for ending the Vietnamese war.")

What is more instructive about the two elections are not the similarities but the differences.  For all that Obama's position is like Nixon's, there was in 1968 a vigorous and independent anti-war movement that the Nixon administration (notably its National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger) knew that they had to deal with.  No such movement exists today: Obama's real victory is successfully to have co-opted it.

There's a second and perhaps more important difference between America of 1968 and today: inequality in income (and even more in wealth) -- having declined from the Great Depression to 1968 -- has increased rapidly since 1968 and is now back to 1929 levels.  Of course there is no recursion to the general social situation of  1968, much less to that of 1929.  The US is a far more civilized society than it was forty years ago, as the election of an African-American as president (and the major-party candidacy  of two women) illustrates.  But wages have been generally flat for the large majority of Americans since about 1973, while a tiny minority have increased their wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. That after all was the goal of the successful counterattack by capitalism in the last 35 years that goes by the name of "neoliberalism" in the rest of the world.  Americans for the most part don't know what to call the vast politico-economic crusade to increase the wealth of the few that took control in the Reagan and Thatcher governments and subsequently ('conservatism' won't do).  But  class differences are clearly more pronounced in America today, as tacitly admitted by liberal support for diversity as a substitute for equality.  (See Walter Benn Michaels' important 2006 book, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.")

OBAMA AS BUSH, CLINTON -- OR NIXON?

With the advent of winter 2008, we have already an answer to the question, Will the Obama administration be George Bush's third term, or Bill Clinton's?  As we survey the personnel in place and the proposed policies, it's clear that it will be both.  Ignoring style, we see that the continuity in US policy, at home and even more abroad, is remarkable.  Mark Twain once observed that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme...

But Obama is not Bush or Clinton: he's Nixon -- without the liberalism. Progressive policies (especially in environmental matters) were forced upon the Nixon-Ford administration by "the sixties" (which began late and peaked in the 1970s -- provoking the neoliberal backlash). Like Nixon, Obama will continue and even intensify the metastasizing war that he inherits, even though he ran against it.  The repudiation of Nixon in the 1970s led to the end of a war and an efflorescence of domestic progressivism.  Despite all the differences, we may perhaps be permitted to hope for a rhyme in 2010s.

President-elect Obama is a dark man -- only trivially so in regard to the amount of melanin in his skin, although that seems to be the most celebrated aspect of his election.   Much darker were his purposes in pursuing the traditional American policies of war and the enrichment of the few, while presenting himself in the campaign as "a blank slate on which supporters could write their wishes," as Chomsky said.  Darkest of all are the prospects for peace and human development in a world dominated by yet another American administration pursuing those policies.

[C. G. Estabrook, who taught at Notre Dame in the dark backward and abysm of time,  presents a weekly hour of political commentary, "News from Neptune" <www.newsfromneptune.com> on Urbana (IL) Public Television; he can be contacted at <galliher at illinois.edu>.]