[Peace-discuss] Breaking the ProgDem “taboo” on talking about Obama’s war crimes

[Robert Naiman]

https://www.facebook.com/robert.naiman/posts/10158599249977656

memo: Breaking the ProgDem “taboo” on talking about Obama’s war crimes

There’s a kind of de facto unwritten agreement among “progressive
Democrats” that we’re not going to talk about Obama’s war crimes. It is
easy to recognize three pillars that sustain this taboo. Nonetheless, if we
take our responsibilities in the next four months as literate and engaged
human beings in America seriously, we must break this taboo.

The first pillar that sustains the taboo is the uncritical reflex
defensiveness and protectiveness towards Obama’s presidency among many
Democrats, which means that anyone who tries to raise any criticism of
Obama’s presidency at all among Democrats is likely to provoke a sharp,
negative response. Some of this uncritical reflex defensiveness and
protectiveness is “natural,” and some of it is “engineered,” but the
consequences are largely the same.

The second pillar is the fact that many “Democrats” who live inside the
Washington Beltway don’t intrinsically care that much about the foreign
victims of U.S. foreign policy, or even worse actively support U.S.
atrocities. They care if a bunch of activists are pounding on their door,
causing them unpleasantness that they care about – it’s the unpleasantness
activists bring to them because of U.S. atrocities that they mostly care
about, not so much the U.S. atrocities themselves. Otherwise, if there’s no
activist unpleasantness to them caused by U.S. atrocities, they don’t care
much – not nearly as much as they care about campaign donations, donations
to “think tanks,” jobs or future jobs from the Pentagon-industrial complex.
This is not the worldview of the majority of Democrats outside the Beltway.
The majority of Democrats outside the Beltway do care about the foreign
victims of U.S. foreign policy and do intrinsically oppose U.S. atrocities.
But the minority of Democrats inside the Beltway who don’t intrinsically
care about the foreign victims of U.S. foreign policy or actively support
U.S. atrocities constitute a critical mass that are likely to sustain bad
faith self-interested identity politics attacks on anyone who tries to
raise criticisms of Obama’s war crimes.

The first two pillars together guarantee unpleasant experiences for anyone
who tries to raise criticisms among Democrats about Obama’s war crimes.

The third pillar is an unconvertible fact: Obama isn’t president anymore.
Given the first two pillars, why bring this up? Why bother? Why create
discord for no reason? As a former Secretary of State said: “At this point,
what difference does it make?” Do you walk into an Orthodox synagogue
trashing Netanyahu? I don’t. What’s the point? What would it accomplish?
How many Palestinian homes in Hebron would be spared from being demolished
by IDF bulldozers as a result of this act?

The three pillars together sustain the belief that talking about Obama’s
war crimes would be discord without purpose, and that failing to talk about
them produces comity without harm.

But this belief is false. Failure to talk about Obama’s war crimes is a
threat to peace, now and in the future. There are many reasons for this.
But the most spectacular urgent reason in the next four months is this: Joe
Biden is running for President, as the so-far favored candidate of the
Democratic Establishment. And the principal “credential” that Joe Biden is
running for President on – arguably the only one – is the fact that he was
Obama’s Vice-President.

There’s no way we can have an honest public conversation about this
juncture if we’re not allowed to talk about Obama’s war crimes. Which is,
of course, why the Biden supporters are the most adamant that we’re not
allowed to talk about this.

For example: Biden was a principal architect of the Iraq war. He didn’t
just vote for the war. As the Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee in the Democratic-controlled Senate, he played a
crucial role in ensuring that the Senate voted for the war. He actively
helped the Bush Administration orchestrate the Senate vote for the war. If
Dick Durbin had been chair of SFRC instead of Joe Biden, the Senate
wouldn’t have voted for the war, and the war wouldn’t have happened, and
American and Iraqi human beings who were killed in the war would be walking
the Earth today. We know that this is true about Dick Durbin not only
because Dick Durbin voted against the war, but because he later gave a
speech on the Senate floor saying that he knew at the time of the vote as a
member of the Senate intelligence committee that the Bush Administration’s
public case for war did not match U.S. intelligence that was being given to
Members of Congress. Of course, Dick Durbin didn’t know this by himself.
Joe Biden knew it too.

Does the fact that Biden was Obama’s Vice-President wash all that away?
How? Why?

For example: when Biden was Obama’s Vice-President in March 2015, the
Obama-Biden Administration unconstitutionally began U.S. participation in
the Saudi war in Yemen, a war that had nothing to do with the values and
interests of Americans outside the Beltway, a war that created the worst
humanitarian crisis in the world, driving millions of innocent human beings
to the brink of famine; thereby breaking every promise Obama-Biden made
while they were running for the White House about not starting
unconstitutional wars and “ending the mindset that got us into war in the
first place.”

Does the fact that Biden was Obama’s Vice-President wash all that away?
How? Why?

The Democratic Establishment didn’t learn much from its role in the Iraq
war. The human being most responsible for this Democratic Establishment
failure to learn from the Iraq war was Barack Obama. Progressive Democrats
are morally obligated to try to have a kind of “#metoo”-like open and
honest public conversation about this if we want to end the endless war.
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