OpEds: “When Obama Bombs”

Editor’s Note:

The smoothest bloviator of them all.

As our readers know, at TGP and Cyrano’s Journal Today we aim to publish a full spectrum of informative and hopefully provocative progressive opinion, from independent left-liberals (i.e., Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald) to Marxian radicals, socialists of various stripes, and a rich complement of simply unclassifiable iconoclastic folks, the likes of Paul Craig Roberts, for example, a man of impeccable rightwing pedigree who also frequently blasts the American establishment and the current insufferable status quo with accuracy and valor.

Yes, it’s fair to say we are not in the least sectarian, and that  none of our editors or contributors need fit a narrow Procustean mould to secure publication.  Similarly, we are not afraid to run opposing opinions or outlying topics when they come wrapped in original, entertaining and lucid formulations.  The idea here is to expand and provoke the mind, and to provide our audience with as much liberating material as possible, hopefully without boring them to tears.

The above doesn’t mean we don’t draw the line somewhere.  As independent radicals, we do, and the line is very clear when it comes to mainstream liberals and social democrats, corpodems, and their ilk, and the huge phalanx of fellow radical centrists who in various capacities are happy to carry water for the global capitalist system. These types we despise. So if you really want to insult us, call us “liberals.”

As you are well aware, besides politicians, many of these mainstream liberals (think Howard Fineman, Chris Matthews, Maureen Dowd, etc.), also comprise the nation’s punditoriat, while in the political slot proper the category includes the vast majority of the Democratic party leadership, from the utterly corrupt DLC with its Clintons, Rahm Emanuels, and Barack Obamas, to their transatlantic accomplices in Britain’s Labor/Liberal alliance—the David Camerons, Tony Blairs, and other less well recognized figures on American shores—and their equally culpable counterparts on the continent, among which the German, French and Spanish Socialist parties stand out for mendacity and collaborationism.

In this taxonomy, left liberals are the trickiest tribe to define. Almost uniformly gifted analysts of the political situation, many of them demonstrably well-meaning, they still maintain an exasperating allegiance to the capitalist system, which they tend to perceive much too often through the glasses of anti-communism. As such, and although there are encouraging exceptions,  far too many of them see themselves—like their mainstream brethren— as “mature players” on the political scene, leftists armed with enough stomach fortitude to practice “realpolitik” in a world which in their view allows for only evil and lesser evil choices. Not surprisingly, militating by choice or by default in the Democratic party, many end up joining periodic crusades to “sweep the rascals out of the temple,” forever believing—and making others believe—that it’s the capitalist figureheads who occupy the throne momentarily, and not the system itself, that needs replacing. (In the process they will often berate Marxists and real socialists and anti-corporatists like Nader for what they regard as petulant infantilism, “spoilerism”, “impossible purity”, and other vices, with the same condescension used recently by Obama to dismiss his grassroots critics.)

Such outbursts of hope  in a “saviour candidate”  invariably lead to bitter disappointment, which lasts, more or less, until the next round of phony elections requires them to rise anew against the latest godawful ticket fielded by the Republicans, a party of such unspeakable corruption, cynicism and criminality that it should have been relegated to the trashbin of history long ago, but wasn’t, precisely because their cousins, the corporate Democrats (centrist/rightist liberals), refused to apply the necessary coup de grace when the monster was flailing on the ground.

In any case, as we all know, the left-liberals’ latest misguided spasm was in support of Barack Obama, the Man from Hope. People of notable intelligence fell for this transparent scam (and still do).  I’m talking here about people in the caliber of  Cornel West, a self-admitted Obama booster who—after almost a decade—recently saw the light and has begun to distance himself from his former hero. Or Keith Olbermann, another prominent liberal capable of scathing analyses, but who used to fall curiously silent when it came to noting Obama’s glaring deficits and betrayals. (In fairness, he was beginning to change, become more vocal in his criticism of Obama when he got the ax at MSNBC-Comcast.)  Others of equal intellectual distinction can be found easily by examining the pages of Mother Jones, The Nation, or The Progressive, or television precincts like PBS or NPR, where even the estimable Bill Moyers still doesn’t seem to “get it” when it comes to the inevitable toxicity generated by the market system’s antisocial dynamics.

So what really distinguishes this kind of liberal, so close to a true socialist, at times even sounding like a Marxian, but who, for some peculiar reason, stubbornly maintains one foot in the fetid capitalist cesspool? In my view, aside from not wanting to let go of the privileges of inclusion—isolation can be punishing—the single most important trait is their refusal to use (or ignorance of) Marxian analysis, which renders a lot of their perceptions obtuse or stillborn. Thus no matter how brilliant their ability to describe the symptoms of the disease—and they frequently do excel at that—they never manage to produce a truly curative prescription: the diagnosis and the therapy are forever and grotesquely out of sync. It can’t be otherwise because even (a big “even” in this case) when their proposed solutions do not fall within the self-serving logic and boundaries of the system, the feature that marks all “solutions” advanced by centrist liberals (like Obama’s Rube Goldberg healthcare reform), they still seek to retain, in some utopian manner, a capitalist framework for the task of social reconstruction. (They insist that capitalism and democracy are not inherently antithetical, an argument no doubt based on the experience of the rapidly shrinking “Scandinavian socialism”.)

•••••••••••

If you’re still with me, perhaps now you will see the reason for my  long-winded intro. Fact is, at the suggestion of a Facebook friend (Amy Mueller) I came across a gifted writer who apparently also happens to be a left liberal (well, maybe I’m wrong, I get my labels confused sometimes, and for all I know M. Tristam may see himself as a socialist).  In any case, Pierre Tristam is certainly iconoclastic enough to be welcome in our pages, even if he makes his debut on TGP by proclaiming recklessly a viva voce that he has been a longstanding admirer of Obama. If you wish to ponder the mysterious contradictions of the liberal mind, the essay below will provide plenty of grist to keep you busy for a while. Naturally, if you find the key to the riddle, let us hear. —Patrice Greanville

____________________________________________________________________________________

PIERRE TRISTAM

“When Obama Bombs”
Originally at FlaglerLive.com

I’VE MADE NO SECRET OF MY ADMIRATION FOR BARACK OBAMA. He had the easiest act to follow since the Buchanan-Lincoln transition. But his speech on the Middle East this week must be a low point. The rhetoric sounded like it was on autopilot. The substance was all over the place. No wonder Obama aides were arguing over the speech until the last minute (the speech was delayed by more than half an hour because they were haggling over wording as if White House policy were a shop front in an Arab bazaar). There’s no clarity of vision in this administration regarding the Middle East. Past the soaring phrases, it’s a salad of contradictions, of hollow presumptions, of back-tracking and hair-splitting.

This was no landmark speech. There was no sizing of opportunities created by the killing of bin Laden. It was stylishly written clichés. I’m amazed at how easily the domestic audience, domesticated as it is by the patronizing and infantile simplicities of television networks (whether Fox or CNN, delude yourself of a difference), bought into the narrative of the “groundbreaking,” or pumped up the hype. Even in print, where, unlike television, IQ is occasionally recognizable. “Obama’s Israel Bombshell,” was the Wall Street Journal’s four-column headline.

Bombshell, no. A bomb of a speech, yes.

Obama was still speaking as if the United States could make much of a difference in the region. But it’s not just al-Qaeda that’s become irrelevant. The events of the last few months have shown to what extent American influence has shrunk, and how compromised America’s moral standing continues to be. It’s not Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons and the no-exit muddles of Iraq and Afghanistan so much anymore, though those blights continue to accrue interest in America’s bank of shame. These days it’s Obama’s refusal to see thuggery for what it is and deal with it on equal terms. He starts another war against Libya because that country’s mad man turned his tanks against his own people. But Bahrain’s and Syria’s mad men are doing the same, and all Obama can do is slap a few sanctions on Syria, after saying nothing for weeks of massacres, and keep hugging and kissing the Bahraini king, because America’s Fifth Fleet is anchored in his port, while the king’s murderous troops crush demonstrators and invite Saudi troops to boot.

Obama continues to be a flip-flopper on these Arab revolutions, which are losing their momentum. For weeks he couldn’t figure out how to respond to the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. He hedged his bets. He wanted to make sure that if the tyrants didn’t fall, he could still be friends with them. He aligned himself with the insurgents only when he was certain that the gangsters he’d called allies and friends all those years were done for good. That’s not courage. It’s keeping up with CNN.

The big news Thursday was supposedly Obama’s endorsement of Israel’s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state. But all he’s doing is catching up to international law, to United Nations resolutions, to where the rest of the world has been, to where even several previous presidents were when American policy wasn’t a subset of whatever Israel was asking for. The only big news about those 1967 borders is that it took the United States so long to rediscover them, and the law.

Even then, Obama was all about hedging. A president who’s allegedly all for self-determination and human rights derided the Palestinians move toward declaring an independent state next September at the United Nations, much in the way that Israel declared itself a state in 1948. It took Harry Truman 20 minutes to recognize Israel back then. It’s been 63 years that the United States has joined Israel in denying Palestinians the right to exist. That hasn’t changed. Yet Israel still grouses, from its invulnerable and immovable existence, that Palestinians deny it the right to exist. Talk about illusion in the service of rhetoric.

In that sense (as in a few others, terrorizing Palestinians militarily, killing them arbitrarily and calling it collateral damage, and repressing them widely and illegally through occupation) Israel is worse than Hamas. Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist in words as idiotic as they are divorced from reality. That’s the mark of imbecilic fanaticism (forgive the oxymoron;  the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, incidentally, explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist in 1993. But Israel denies not only Palestine’s right to exist in actual fact; it denies Palestinians the right to exist—in history, in culture, in textbooks, and of course in the most important state of them all: in a state of their own. Obama, like most of his predecessors, have been complicit in that denial, swallowing whole the disingenuous Israel’s rhetoric about its existence hinging in the least on what Hamas’s moronic charter says. That didn’t change in Thursday’s speech. It was instead emphasized with Obama’s obnoxious suggestion that September’s UN vote for Palestinian statehood would be counter-productive. That from a president fighting four wars in the Middle East—Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, “terror”—allegedly in the name of Arab and Afghan self-determination against those who’d deny it.

But the square-peg-in-round-hole-hypocrisy of American presidents has no bounds in the Middle East. Arabs and Muslims briefly imagined Barack Obama to be different. He’s been an improvement. But improving from catastrophic to dismal isn’t much of an improvement. There was not a word about Saudi Arabia in Thursday’s speech, either, though Saudi Arabia, as close an ally as any in the Middle East, is in the same league of regressive tyrannies as the Taliban or North Korea—a sheikhdom as corrupt as they come, an illegitimate monarchy, an insult to women and an offense against liberty that the United States nevertheless embraces with strategic abandon. No word about the United Arab Republic, for that matter—a nation that’s just hired Blackwater’s private mercenaries to build it a private army of Seal-wannabes, apparently with the Obama administration’s quiet approval—and no word about other Arab clients that are no less illegitimate than Libya: Algeria, Morocco, Kuwai, Oman, Yemen, even Qatar and Iraq, where democracy is a vague glimmer.

And no word about the region’s backsliding. Egypt hasn’t been much different since Hosni Mubarak’s departure. The country is ruled by a military dictatorship. Arbitrary arrests, military trials, torture, censorship and the humiliation of citizens goes on. A blogger who had the temerity to criticize the military in a few sentences was sentenced to three years in prison, after the obligatory torture and humiliation that substitutes for Miranda rights in Egypt as it does in virtually every Arab state. In Egypt now there’s the added anxiety of street crime, which was rare during the old regime. Instead of reminding Egypt that it’s still the second-richest recipient of American aid after Israel, and that those billions should depend on immediate and verifiable civil rights reforms, Obama has accepted the new dictatorship as if the revolution never took place.

Elevating the Bush administration’s Mideast policy, which really was no policy other than war by every mean, would be ludicrous: American legitimacy and credibility is bankrupt primarily because of Bush’s trigger-happy cavalcades in the region, and his blind eye to Israel’s disproportionate clobberings of Palestinians on one hand and its South Florida-like development of the occupied West Bank by illegal settlements on the other. But Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, delivered one speech in 2005 in which which she admitted in a few lines what Obama has yet to do: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither,” she said.

Make that 65 years.

The victorious people of Cairo’s Tahrir Square now have kindred spirits in the people of Chicago’s Grant Park, who must be wondering what happened to the man they elected in 2008. It’s like the Seth Myers joke at the White House correspondents’ dinner three weeks ago. Myers made fun of the Republican field of presidential candidates which, lucky for Obama, stars a line-up of suits approximating life forms. “So it’s not a strong field, and who knows if they can beat you in 2012,” Myers told the president, “but I can tell you who can definitely beat you Mr. President: 2008 Barack Obama.”

That’s assuming that that man’s existence was ever any more real than, say, a Palestinian state.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Says Pierre Tristam: “I was born and raised in Lebanon, schooled in the United States, salaried in journalism, and now write editorials and a weekly column for the Daytona Beach News-Journal in Florida, making me one of the 0.3 Arab-Americans with a column in the mainstream American press.”  He runs a highly idiosyncratic web site (Candide’s Notebooks) which he warns us, “is entirely independent of the newspaper. I welcome contributors, even from the opposition: this is a no-censorship zone (except for dull and poor writing), preaching to the choir is pointless, and progress begins with disagreement. But the usual journalistic standards of accuracy, fairness and prohibitions on libel and defamation very much apply.”  We are pleased to open our pages to Tristam’s original contributions.

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Obama’s Middle East speech: “democratic” rhetoric cloaks predatory policy

Obama’s speech on the Middle East, and especially his remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, have detonated the usual storm of confusion in America, with many people–abetted by the media–taking at face value Obama’s allusions to the building of a two-state solution.  Ignoring the pervasive hypocrisy in the presidential speech, and the fact it is riddled with enormous topical holes, the right wing is already on the march berating him for “betraying Israel,” as the Israeli right wing and its well-placed supporters in the US  provide the usual hysterical chorus. The baying and howling from the right may be so loud that some progressives, as it happened with Obama’s healthcare reform,  may be pardoned for actually believing the president has actually advanced something progressive.— P. Greanville

By Bill Van Auken, Senior political writer, WSWS.ORG | 20 May 2011

Obama's speech on the Middle East: Far less than meets the eye.

In his “Arab spring” speech Thursday, Obama sought to cloak US imperialism’s predatory aims in the Middle East and North Africa in a mass of hypocritical and empty “democratic” rhetoric.

While promoted by the White House as the initiation of a change of course in US policy, Obama’s rambling and distorted review of recent developments in the region offered nothing of the kind.

Rather, they signaled US imperialism’s determination to continue its drive to exert hegemonic control over the oil-rich countries of the Middle East and North Africa in the face of a powerful revolutionary challenge from below and ever stiffer competition from economic rivals in China and Europe.

According to initial press reports, the speech was largely received with dismissal and contempt in the Arab countries. Despite Obama’s use of the word “democracy” or “democratic” 23 times in his address, there was no sense in the speech that anything has changed in the policy of a government that has steadfastly backed ruthless dictatorships and monarchies in the region and given unqualified support for six decades to Israel’s suppression of the Palestinian people.

Obama began by summarily dismissing the significance of the two US wars that began under the Bush White House and have continued under his presidency, claiming the lives of over a million people.

“Now, already, we’ve done much to shift our foreign policy following a decade defined by two costly conflicts,” he said. “After years of war in Iraq, we’ve removed 100,000 American troops and ended our combat mission there. In Afghanistan, we’ve broken the Taliban’s momentum, and this July we will begin to bring our troops home and continue a transition to Afghan lead.”

As if militarism and war did not continue to “define” US foreign policy. In Iraq, nearly 50,000 US troops remain, and the Pentagon is maneuvering with the Iraqi government to keep a significant number of them there permanently. As for the claim that the US has “broken the Taliban’s momentum,” with nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, violence remains at record levels and there is every indication that the population is turning ever more hostile to the US occupation and the puppet government that it has maintained.

Obama went on to boast of the US killing of Osama bin Laden as a “huge blow” to al-Qaeda, while in the same breath acknowledging that the former CIA ally had lost his “relevance” in the face of the upheavals in the Middle East over the past several months. The attempt to segue from a dirty assassination to the revolutionary uprising of the masses fell flat.

Perhaps the most hypocritical aspect of the speech―and one that will evoke contempt throughout the Arab world―was Obama’s attempt to identify US policy and “values” with the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

He began by retelling the story of Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in protest over abuse at the hands of the Tunisian authorities, an act that inspired protests that spread and grew, finally leading to the ouster of the dictatorial regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Obama’s invocation of Bouazizi’s name is beneath contempt. While the young man lay dying and Tunisians were being shot and beaten in the streets, his administration approved a $12 million military aid package in an attempt to keep the regime in place.

The same pattern was repeated in Egypt, where the Obama administration sought to the very last to salvage the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, whose regime had been kept in place with US military aid and political support for three decades. Only after the Egyptian military made the decision to pull the plug on Mubarak’s rule did Obama publicly state his support for the dictator’s ouster.

Obama continued by proclaiming, “In too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of the few. In too many countries, a citizen like that young vendor had nowhere to turn―no honest judiciary to hear his case; no independent media to give him voice; no credible political party to represent his views; no free and fair election where he could choose his leader.”

The US president cast these conditions as characteristic of the Middle East. But are they really so inapplicable to the United States itself, where federal and state governments are imposing drastic social cutbacks that will deny “dignity” to millions, and where power and wealth is more concentrated in the hands of a few than virtually anywhere on the planet?

Do Bouazizi’s American counterparts, the millions of unemployed and underpaid young workers in the US, have anywhere to turn in terms of political parties that will represent their interests or a media that will speak to their concerns and demands?

Yet Obama tried to cast the US as the example to be emulated and the benevolent power whose role it is to guide the Arab peoples to democracy.

He said that the US would continue to pursue its “core interests” in the region, which he defined as “countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce, and safe-guarding the security of the region, standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace.”

Oddly missing from this list, and indeed from the entire speech was one three-letter word, “oil.” Its omission underscores the lying character of the entire address.

The US, Obama said, would continue to pursue these “core interests” with “the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they are essential to them.” He didn’t bother to explain―much less apologize for―how the defense of these regional interests was anchored for three decades in the repressive apparatus of the Mubarak dictatorship.

Now, he said, the US would support “universal rights” of freedom of speech, assembly and religion, the rule of law and “the right to choose your own leaders―whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus, Sanaa or Tehran.”

Noticeably absent from this list were Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Kuwait, all reactionary monarchical dictatorships that serve as lynchpins of the domination of US energy conglomerates and the US military’s operations in the region.

Obama included in the speech a somewhat hasty and unintentionally revealing defense of the US-NATO war against Libya. He began by claiming that the Iraq experience had taught Washington “how costly and difficult it is to impose regime change by force―no matter how well-intentioned it may be.” He continued, “But in Libya, we saw the prospect of imminent massacre…. Had we not acted along with our NATO allies and regional coalition partners, thousands would have been killed.”

By attributing good intentions to the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US president endorses a war of aggression launched on the basis of lies. He then acknowledges that the war in Libya, ostensibly carried out to protect civilian lives, is in fact a war for “regime change.” The claims that if Washington and NATO had not acted “thousands would have been killed,” has never been substantiated. And, in fact, thousands have died―and millions have been turned into refugees―as a result of a civil war that is being prosecuted by means of NATO military power.

In both Iraq and Libya, the wars involve not “universal rights,” but rather “core interests,” above all US imperialism’s drive to exert hegemony over the world’s strategic energy reserves.

In short, the “universal values” espoused by Obama are imminently flexible, their method of application determined entirely by US imperialism’s “core interests.”

The speech also promoted US initiatives to “advance economic development for countries that transition to democracy.” Obama asserted that this was based on the understanding that the revolutionary upheavals in the region were driven by concerns over “putting food on the table” and being “unable to find a job.”

What Washington’s proposed economic policies amount to is an attempt to use the changes brought about by the mass protests to open the region up even more fully to the exploitation of American capitalism and US-based transnationals.

He said that US policy would “focus on trade, not just aid; and investment, not just assistance.” Its aim, he said, would be opening up the region’s markets, while “ensuring financial stability.”

It was precisely the pursuit of capitalist free market policies under the dictatorships of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt that produced staggering levels of social inequality and opened up these countries’ economies to the impact of the financial meltdown of 2008, producing the growth in unemployment. These conditions of inequality and unemployment played the decisive role in sparking the resistance of the working class in the first place.

The aim of the Obama administration is to use limited credits―$1 billion in debt relief and $1 billion in new borrowing from the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) ―to tie the Egyptian economy more closely to the US. These sums are eclipsed by the billions of dollars in military aid that Washington to continues to bestow on Mubarak’s successor regime, which is essentially a military junta that continues to repress the Egyptian people and lock up and torture dissidents.

The section of Obama’s speech that has drawn the most attention from the US media is his remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian question. Much has been made of his call for a resumption of negotiations based on the goal of creating two states―Israel and Palestine―“based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

The Republican right has seized on this statement, claiming it represents a betrayal of Israel. The more astute reactions in Israel to the speech, however, were quite different.

“Obama has granted Netanyahu a major diplomatic victory,” the Israeli daily Haaretz commented. It noted that the US president had invoked the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders “without defining the size of these lands” and providing for “swaps” that would allow Israel to retain control of the vast settlements in the West Bank, rendering any new state unviable.

The report also noted that Obama made no condemnation of the illegal settlements nor did he demand a freeze on settlement activity, which is sharply accelerating with plans unveiled Thursday for building 1,550 new homes in the occupied territories around Jerusalem.

Dripping in hypocrisy, Obama’s speech referred to Israelis living in fear of their children being killed and Palestinians’ “suffering and humiliation” under occupation. One would never guess that Israeli occupation has claimed 100 Palestinian lives for every Israeli killed in the conflict or that just days before, Israeli troops had shot to death 16 unarmed Palestinian protesters who sought to assert their right to return to their homeland by scaling borders into Israeli occupied territory.

That these demonstrations, which were joined by many thousands of workers and youth who marched on the borders from squalid refugee camps, are part and parcel of the revolutionary wave sweeping the region was utterly excluded from Obama’s “vision.”

In the end, the speech presented nothing new in terms of US policy and expressed the Obama administration’s commitment to using the traditional tools of militarism, economic domination and CIA destabilization to assert US control over the region’s strategic energy resources and to quell the struggles of its working class.

At the same time, however, this absence of substantive initiatives and utter inability to make any credible appeal to the Arab masses express the decline of US imperialist influence in the region and the increasing desperation of the American ruling elite as it attempts to fend off the threat of revolutionary upheaval

 

 

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Obama’s Imperial Offensive

by Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford

On Thursday, the worlds most cynical rhetorician will attempt to frame regime change and political assassination as defense of civilians and promotion of democracy. Only Americans will be fooled. President Obama has discarded all but the snakeskin of international law. “The Euro-American imperialists and Arab royal mafiosa hope their joint venture will quarantine or crush the Arab Reawakening outside its (barely and tentatively) ‘liberated’ territory in Egypt and Tunisia.”

The shock of seeing the empire’s death pass in front of its eyes caused the Obama administration to kick the U.S. military’s Full Spectrum Dominance machinery into high gear.”

President Obama’s speech to “reset” the U.S. stance in the Middle East will take place at the State Department, but the Pentagon is the true epicenter of American policy toward the Arab Reawakening. Briefly paralyzed early in the year by the specter of resurgent Arab nationalism in the planet’s most vital energy reservoirs, Washington quickly launched a massive military assault on Libya in collaboration with European mini-imperialists to show the Arab world who’s really the boss. In the Persian Gulf region, the Saudi Arabian monarchy gathered up their fellow emirs, sultans and sheiks to safeguard the common patrimony of royal families against democratic or nationalist subversion.

Moammar Gaddafi was drafted as imperialism’s designated demon in North Africa, while Shi’ite Iran served as the scapegoat for royal reaction in the Gulf. The monarch-dominated Gulf Cooperation Council, acting through a confused Arab League, gave moral cover to the Euro-American bum-rush of an equally confused United Nations Security Council. “No-fly” Resolution 1973 landed on the heads of Libyan soldiers amidst the methodical destruction of the country’s infrastructure. Thousands of miles to the east, the Saudis and lesser royals brutally smashed the democratic aspirations of Bahrain’s Shia majority, and schemed to save Yemen from a peaceful people’s uprising.

R2P is now wholly discredited in the eyes of the conscious world.”

In the short-term, the Euro-American imperialists and Arab royal mafiosa hope their joint venture will quarantine or crush the Arab Reawakening outside its (barely and tentatively) “liberated” territory in Egypt and Tunisia. But the shock of seeing the empire’s death pass in front of its eyes in the form of a democratic – and, by definition, anti-U.S. imperialism – Arab nationalist oil dominion caused the Obama administration to kick the U.S. military’s Full Spectrum Dominance machinery into high gear. The world needed to know that this president will not allow American spheres of hegemony to shrink on his watch, and that he has the means and the inclination to kill at will. In the space of a few days, hits were made on Osama bin Laden, Moammar Gaddafi and Yemeni-American Anwar al-Awlaki. Should anyone have been fooled by President Obama’s soothing “A New Beginning [8]” speech in Cairo back in June, 2009, they were quickly reminded that Assassinations-R-US.

At the State Department on Thursday, Obama will likely attempt to elevate “humanitarian” military intervention, or “Responsibility to Protect” (R2p), to something akin to an Obama Doctrine – weaving it into his rhetorical “reset” of relations with Arabs, Muslims and the Greater Middle East. Only the American audience (and imperial-minded Europeans) will take him seriously. No sooner was the UN Security Council resolution to “protect” Libyan civilians issued, than it was mangled into a mandate for regime change and political assassination at NATO’s discretion. International law became its opposite. R2P is now wholly discredited in the eyes of the conscious world –which, unfortunately, excludes most Americans.

The International Criminal Court, to which the United States is not a signatory, but which it deploys to indict selected Africans – and only Africans – for human rights offenses, has been eclipsed by Obama’s imperial offensive. Why go through the motions of indicting designated enemies, when Full Spectrum Dominance enables the U.S. to execute them at leisure. The Rubicon has been crossed. Obama’s “reset” speech will only prove that the First Black President is a more outrageously cynical international outlaw than his predecessor.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [9].

[10]

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-imperial-offensive

Links:
[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/assassinate-gaddafi
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/attack-libya
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/full-spectrum-dominance-0
[4] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/humanitarian-military-intervention
[5] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/r2p
[6] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/resolution-1973
[7] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/obama_warmonger1.jpg
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1305724300-SLWGSRqj0WGIlSQW8VKQJw
[9] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
[10] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Fobama%25E2%2580%2599s-imperial-offensive&linkname=Obama%E2%80%99s%20Imperial%20Offensive

 

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RISE OF THE OBAMABOTS

By Ted Rall—
Stifling Liberal Dissent Under Obama

Rall

NEW YORK–After they called the presidency for Obama, emails poured in. “You must be relieved now that the Democrats are taking over,” an old college buddy told me. “There will be less pressure on you.”

That would have been nice.

In the late 1990s my cartoons ran in Time, Fortune and Bloomberg Personal magazines and over 100 daily and alternative weekly newspapers. I was a staff writer for two major magazines.

Then Bush came in. And 9/11 happened.

The media gorged on an orgy of psychotic right-wing rhetoric. Flags everywhere. Torture suddenly OK. In a nation where mainstream political discourse was redefined between Dick Cheney on the right and libertarian Bill Maher on the not-as-right, there wasn’t any room in the paper for a left-of-center cartoonist. My business was savaged. Income plunged.

My editor at Time called me on September 13, 2001. “We’re discontinuing all cartoons,” she told me. I was one of four cartoonists at the newsweekly. “Humor is dead.” I snorted. They never brought back cartoons.

McCarthyism–blackballing–made a big comeback. I had been drawing a monthly comic strip, “The Testosterone Diaries,” for Men’s Health. No politics. It was about guy stuff: dating, job insecurity, prostate tests, that sort of thing. They fired me. Not because of anything I drew for them. It was because of my syndicated editorial cartoons, which attacked Bush and his policies. The publisher worried about pissing off right-wingers during a period of nationalism on steroids.

Desperate and going broke, I called an editor who’d given me lots of work at the magazines he ran during the 1990s. “Sorry, dude, I can’t help,” he replied. “You’re radioactive.”

It was tempting, when Obama’s Democrats swept into office in 2008, to think that the bad old days were coming to an end. I wasn’t looking for any favors, just a swing of the political pendulum back to the Clinton years when it was still OK to be a liberal.

This, you have no doubt correctly guessed, is the part where I tell you I was wrong.

I didn’t count on the cult of personality around Barack Obama.

In the 1990s it was OK to attack Clinton from the left. I went after the Man From Hope and his centrist, “triangulation”-obsessed Democratic Leadership Council for selling out progressive principles. Along with like-minded political cartoonists including Tom Tomorrow and Lloyd Dangle, my cartoons and columns took Clinton’s militant moderates to the woodshed for NAFTA, the WTO and welfare reform. A pal who worked in the White House informed me that the President, known for his short temper, stormed into his office and slammed a copy of that morning’s Washington Post down on the desk with my cartoon showing. “How dare your friend compare me to Bush?” he shouted. (The first Bush.)

It was better than winning a Pulitzer.

It feels a little weird to write this, like I’m telling tales out of school and ratting out the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. But it’s true: there’s less room for a leftie during the Age of Obama than there was under Bush.

I didn’t realize how besotted progressives were by Mr. Hopey Changey.

Obama lost me before Inauguration Day, when he announced cabinet appointments that didn’t include a single liberal.

It got worse after that: Obama extended and expanded Bush’s TARP giveaway to the banks; continued Bush’s spying on our phone calls; ignored the foreclosure crisis; refused to investigate, much less prosecute, Bush’s torturers; his healthcare plan was a sellout to Big Pharma (and the Big Health Insurance Mafia); he kept Gitmo open; expanded the war against Afghanistan; dispatched more drone bombers; used weasel words to redefine the troops in Iraq as “non-combat”; extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich; claiming the right to assassinate U.S. citizens; most recently, there was the forced nudity torture of PFC Bradley Manning and expanding oil drilling offshore and on national lands.

I was merciless to Obama. I was cruel in my criticisms of Obama’s sellouts to the right. In my writings and drawings I tried to tell it as it was, or anyway, as I saw it. I thought–still think–that’s my job. I’m a critic, not a suck-up. The Obama Administration doesn’t need journalists or pundits to carry its water. That’s what press secretaries and PR flacks are for.
Does Obama ever do anything right? Not often, but sure. And when he does, I shut up about it. Cartoonists and columnists who promote government policy are an embarrassment.

But that’s what “liberal” media outlets want in the age of Obama.

Obama has been a terrible disappointment to the American left. He has forsaken liberals at every turn. Yet they continue to stand by him. Which means that, in effect, they are not liberals at all. They are militant Democrats. They are Obamabots.

I can’t prove it in every case. (That’s how blackballing works.) The Nation and Mother Jones and Harper’s, liberal magazines that gave me freelance work under Clinton and Bush, now ignore my queries. Even when I offered them first-person, unembedded war reporting from Afghanistan. Hey, maybe they’re too busy to answer email or voicemail. You never know.

Other censors are brazen.

There’s been a push among political cartoonists to get our work into the big editorial blogs and online magazines that seem poised to displace traditional print political magazines like The Progressive. In the past, editorial rejections had numerous causes: low budgets, lack of space, an editor who simply preferred another creator’s work over yours.

Now there’ s a new cause for refusal: Too tough on the president.

I’ve heard that from enough “liberal” websites and print publications to consider it a significant trend.

A sample of recent rejections, each from editors at different left-of-center media outlets:

· “I am familiar with and enjoy your cartoons. However the readers of our site would not be comfortable with your (admittedly on point) criticism of Obama.”

· “Don’t be such a hater on O and we could use your stuff. Can’t you focus more on the GOP?”

· “Our first African-American president deserves a chance to clean up Bush’s mess without being attacked by us.”

I have many more like that.

What’s weird is that these cultish attitudes come from editors and publishers whose politics line up neatly with mine. They oppose the bailouts. They want us out of Afghanistan and Iraq. They disapprove of Obama’s new war against Libya. They want Obama to renounce torture and Guantánamo.

Obama is the one they ought to be blackballing. He has been a terrible disappointment to the American left. He has forsaken liberals at every turn. Yet they continue to stand by him. Which means that, in effect, they are not liberals at all. They are militant Democrats. They are Obamabots.

As long as Democrats win elections, they are happy. Nevermind that their policies are the same as, or to the right of, the Republicans.

“So what should I think about [the war in Libya]?,” asks Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. “If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he’s smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted.”

Mr. Drum, call your office. Someone found your brain in the break room.
Barack Obama and the Democrats have made it perfectly clear that they don’t care about the issues and concerns that I care about. Unlike Kevin Drum, I think–I know–I’m smarter than Barack Obama. I wouldn’t have made half the mistakes he has.

So I don’t care about Obama. Or the Democrats. I care about America and the world and the people who live in them.

Hey, Obamabots: when the man you support betrays your principles, he has to go–not your principles.

Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com

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OpEds: Forget Sarah Palin and Donald Trump: Obama needs a challenge from the left

If the president had a Democratic opponent in the primaries it might stop him repeatedly triangulating to the right

Mehdi Hasan 

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 May 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/11/barack-obama-primaries-palin-trump

    Cast your minds back to November. Barack Obama had received his “shellacking” in the midterm elections, as the Republicans regained a majority in the House of Representatives and seized control of 29 of the 50 state governorships. It was the worst midterm defeat for the Democrats since 1938. Just a week earlier the president’s approval ratings had fallen to a record low of 37%.

    Fast forward six months, and the president is enjoying the “Bin Laden bounce”. His approval ratings stand at 52%, according to Gallup – up six points on April. Historians may look back on 1 May 2011, and the killing of Osama, as the day Obama secured his re-election.

    But even before the al-Qaida leader was dumped in the ocean, Obama had reason to be optimistic. Just 18 months away from the next election he has no obvious or credible Republican opponent. So far, the listless lineup of potential presidential candidates resembles the characters from the bar scene in Star Wars – a motley collection of far-right loons, freaks and conspiracy theorists.

    There’s the former senator, Rick Santorum, who once compared homosexuality to bestiality and paedophilia; former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who has said America must stand with “our North Korean allies”; Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who believes carbon dioxide is “not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas”; former governor Mitt Romney, who has said he won’t appoint Muslim-Americans to his cabinet; Tea Party Congressman Ron Paul, who wants to scrap income tax and abolish the education department; and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who published a book last year titled To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Oh, and the “birther” billionaire Donald Trump.

    The heart sinks. Lamenting the presidency of George W Bush, the late JK Galbraith once remarked: “I never thought I would yearn for Ronald Reagan.” The current Republican presidential field makes one yearn for Dubya.

    The tragedy is that Obama needs to be held to account – but from a leftwing, not rightwing, direction. He has embraced and affirmed a centre-right world view utterly at odds with his 2008 presidential campaign, with its promises of “change”, “reform” and a decisive break from the Bush-Cheney era.

    Consider his record: he failed to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay; approved the use of military tribunals for detainees; “surged” 40,000 troops into Afghanistan; doubled the size of the detention facility at Bagram airbase; doubled the number of drone strikes inside Pakistan; gave CIA torturers immunity from prosecution; continued extraordinary rendition; said he didn’t “begrudge” bankers paying themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses’ ruled out a government-run “public option” on healthcare; froze pay for public sector workers; signed off on tax cuts for billionaires; vetoed a UN resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlement-building; and joined China in sabotaging the climate summit in Copenhagen.

    Obama hasn’t just neglected his base, he has abused it.

    Liberals have given Obama a pass. Some avert their gaze; others proffer excuses. He needs more time, they say. But he has had 29 months in office. He is a good man in a bad world, they say, before blaming the Republicans for all America’s ills. But it wasn’t a Republican Congress that forced him, for instance, to double the size of the Bagram facility – where human rights groups have documented torture and deaths – and deny prisoners the right to challenge their detention. He did that on his own. Bagram is Obama’s Guantánamo.

    The double standards are glaring. Imagine, for a moment, the outcry from Democrats if Dubya had held the 23-year-old US soldier, Bradley Manning – the alleged WikiLeaks source – in conditions described as “degrading and inhumane” by more than 250 eminent legal scholars. Shamefully, however, Obama publicly defended Manning’s detention, including his solitary confinement, as “appropriate”.

    The irony is that Obama, a self-styled conciliator and healer, has spent much of his presidency appeasing Republican foes on Capital Hill and capitulating to corporations and Wall Street banks. He has eschewed populism, allowing the Tea Party to surf public anger over bank bailouts and bonuses, job losses and home repossessions.

    But what else should one expect from a White House stuffed with corporate-friendly, Clinton-era figures? The president’s chief of staff, William Daley, appointed in January, is a former banker, and opposed Obama’s healthcare reform. His treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, George Osborne’s new best friend, was one of the architects of bank deregulation. Meanwhile, progressive economic voices like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman are studiously ignored.

    Obama hasn’t just neglected his base, he has abused it. The president’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed liberals who objected to Obama’s healthcare bill as “fucking retarded”; the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, ridiculed the “professional left” and said liberal critics of the president “ought to be drug-tested”. Obama himself has described Democrats opposed to his compromises on tax cuts as “sanctimonious”.

    I have a proposal. Why not give him an electoral target for this animosity? Why not run a left candidate against Obama in the Democratic primaries next February? A Democratic opponent would act as a countervailing force to whichever Tea Party-backed Republican he ends up facing in the presidential election. It might force Obama to triangulate to the left as well as the right, and encourage the Democrats to have a long-overdue discussion about their values, policies and direction.

    An Associated Press poll last October found an astonishing 47% of Democratic voters believed that Obama should be challenged from within the party for the 2012 nomination. Potential candidates include Dennis Kucinich, Ohio’s leftwing Congressman; Howard Dean, the populist ex-governor of Vermont; and Rachel Maddow, the cable news presenter. None of them would win. But that wouldn’t be the point. It would be about holding Obama’s feet to the fire.

    It is a risky strategy, given that none of the last three presidents to face primaries while seeking re-election – Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush – survived to serve a second term. Would a primary challenge from the left wreck Obama’s chances of re-election? I suspect not, given the Bin Laden bounce and the weakness of his Republican opponents. The question that progressives should ask is whether they believe Obama should only have to answer to the likes of Donald Trump and Sarah Palin.

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