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

Wed Sep 4 16:46:09 UTC 2019

Excellent and timely advice. 

We should vote only for an anti-war candidate, in the primaries and the general election. —CGE

> On Sep 4, 2019, at 11:02 AM, Robert Naiman via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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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