[Peace-discuss] [Peace] How a Presidential Election is like a War or a Trade Deal

[Robert Naiman]

To me, the point is: now we're at a juncture where we could make a
different choice and it might have an opportunity to matter unprecedented
in the time since some of us 54-year-olds were old enough to vote.



On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 4:04 PM Brussel, Morton K <brussel at illinois.edu>
wrote:

> A useful narrative, but that omits early indications that Obama could not
> be trusted, as Paul Street wrote about. And now?
>
> On Jan 17, 2020, at 12:45 PM, Robert Naiman via Peace <
> peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>
>
> https://www.facebook.com/robert.naiman/posts/10159052620347656
>
> How a Presidential Election is like a War or a Trade Deal
>
> Have you ever accidentally turned into a one-way street going the wrong
> way when there was significant traffic? It’s not always trivial to figure
> out how to safely extract yourself from your mistake. Somehow you have to
> turn your car around 180 degrees to get back into the legal flow of
> traffic, while the legal flow of traffic is swarming around you, honking at
> the annoying illegal obstacle in the middle of the legal flow of traffic.
> Some mistakes are easy to reverse. Some mistakes are hard to reverse. The
> people who own America understand these dynamics very well, so they and
> their designees work very hard at three things: creating one-time choices
> for us that are very hard to reverse, limiting the number of apparent
> available choices, and then tricking us into making the worst available
> choice for us and the best available choice for them. Three things that we
> face have these dynamics in common: presidential elections, wars, and trade
> deals.
>
> In 2007-2008, it was a “slam dunk” that Obama was the best available
> realistic choice among the presidential candidates from the point of view
> of those who were trying to end and prevent wars. Polls indicated that
> there were three realistic Democratic candidates: Clinton, Edwards, and
> Obama. Clinton and Edwards had voted for the Iraq war and were clearly
> close to and pandering to the pro-war wing of the Democratic Party. Obama
> had not been in Congress, but he had opposed the Iraq war and promised to
> end it and promised to engage Iran and other “U.S. adversaries”
> diplomatically [including, it’s hard to remember now, Russia, Syria, Cuba,
> Venezuela, and North Korea.]
>
> But as soon as he was on track to win the Democratic presidential
> nomination, Obama started pivoting away from the things he had promised to
> do to “end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” And in the
> main, he never stopped pivoting away from the things he had promised to do,
> as much as he could get away with. He took Joe Biden as his running mate,
> the same Joe Biden who as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
> had ensured the passage of the authorization for the use of military force
> that enabled the catastrophic Iraq war. This choice was justified at the
> time as being necessary to appease the pro-war wing of the Democratic
> Party. Then he took Hillary Clinton, who had also voted for the Iraq war,
> as his Secretary of State. Again, this choice was justified as being
> necessary to appease the pro-war wing of the Democratic Party, but by this
> point, Obama had already been elected President. That should have been a
> big warning signal that people who wanted Obama to “end the mindset that
> got us into war in the first place,” which he had promised to do, were in
> big trouble in terms of what Obama’s intentions were. It was also a strong
> indication that regardless of what happened in the election, regardless of
> who won, regardless of what they had promised to do, there was an entirely
> different process at work in Washington DC shaping Obama’s choices as
> President that had nothing to do with a democratic election, but had
> everything to do with appeasing the pro-war forces in the Democratic Party
> that Obama had run against.
>
> In my experience, if you try to raise these issues with Democrats, they
> tend to make dismissive excuses, like “Republican obstruction.” But while
> there was undoubtedly “Republican obstruction,” there were also key
> junctures where Obama did the opposite of what he had promised to do, where
> there was no “Republican obstruction” explanation for his choice.
>
> One of the most spectacular of these choices, for those who care about war
> and peace, was Obama’s decision to use military force to overthrow the
> Libyan government without Congressional authorization in 2011. This was a
> violation of two key interrelated Obama promises: his promise to “end the
> mindset that got us into war in the first place,” and his promise to
> respect Article I of the Constitution, reaffirmed by the War Powers
> Resolution in 1973, which says that Congress, not the President, decides
> when we go to war. “Republican obstruction” didn’t force Obama to do this.
> On the contrary, the majority of House Republicans were against it. Obama’s
> Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, was against it. Gates, a Republican, had
> been Bush’s Defense Secretary after Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld following
> the 2006 Congressional election when Democrats took over Congress. But
> Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom Obama had defeated in the
> Democratic primary, promising that he would “end the mindset that got us
> into war,” was strongly for it.
>
> This decision unleashed a lot of terrible consequences which we’re still
> living with today. It set a terrible precedent for presidential war without
> Congressional authorization which we are still working to unwind and which
> made a major contribution to the catastrophes in Yemen and Syria. Libya
> still doesn’t have a functioning government, it’s still the victim of an
> ongoing civil war and proxy war fueled by outside powers. The overthrow of
> the Libyan government unleashed Al Qaeda fighters and weapons into Africa
> and the Middle East, which is still causing destabilization today, and
> which is the purported justification for even more U.S. military action
> which Congress never authorized. Obama’s unilateral decision to overthrow
> the Libyan government, without Congressional authorization, created an
> expectation among the Syrian opposition that at the end of the day, Obama
> would do the same in Syria, and this made them more intransigent towards
> diplomatic and political efforts to end the Syrian civil war, a major
> contribution to that catastrophe. By the time that Obama helped launch the
> Saudi military intervention in Yemen in March 2015 without Congressional
> authorization, unleashing the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world
> which persists today, most Democrats were habituated to the idea that Obama
> uses military force without Congressional authorization. Dennis Kucinich
> was gone from Congress. There were no Democrats left to object.
>
> And the terrible Libya 2011 decision was largely supported by Democrats at
> the time [except for Dennis Kucinich and a group of House Democrats who
> stood with him for the Constitution and against Obama.] Indeed, those of us
> who opposed it were viciously attacked by Democrats as “helping Republicans
> to hurt Obama.” And this was in the context of an Obama choice that was
> 100% the opposite of what he had promised to do, which was not forced on
> him by “Republican obstruction” but by appeasing the pro-war wing of the
> Democratic Party which he had run against, which was opposed by his own
> Republican Secretary of Defense, and which choice he himself described as a
> “turd sandwich,” right before he made the choice.
>
> This is the context in which Democrats who really care about ending
> endless war must now evaluate current promises by Democratic presidential
> candidates to end endless war. Every such promise like this was broken by
> Obama, and the people backing Obama did nothing about it, in fact they
> attacked the people who tried to do something about it.
>
> We’re about to make a turn which might lead to going the wrong way down a
> one-way street that will be hard to turn back from. And unfortunately,
> we’re living in a world of “Mr. Pine’s Mixed-Up Signs.” All the street
> signs are wrong. Everything Democratic Presidential candidates say is
> completely meaningless as a judge of what they will do. We have to figure
> out some way to decide what the correct turn to make is without relying on
> the mixed-up road signs.
>
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