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

[Robert Naiman]

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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