SCARE THE WORLD: OBAMA PUTS US BACK ON TRACK
By Alexander Cockburn
First Post
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March 11 2010
UK
Accused of bumbling, Barack Obama is only doing what’s expected of
him – flexing American muscle
Are they really bumblers? The establishment’s opinion columns quiver
with reproofs for maladroit handling of foreign policy by President
Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, those
who cherished foolish illusions that Obama’s election might presage
a shift to the left in foreign policy fret about "worrisome signs"
that this is not the case.
It’s true that there have been some embarrassing moments. Vice
President Biden, on a supposed mission of peace to Israel, is given the
traditional welcome – a pledge by Israel to build more settlements,
plus an adamant refusal to reverse the accelerating evictions of
Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.
Hillary Clinton, touring Latin America, was not greeted with gobs of
spit, like Vice President Richard Nixon back in 1958, but she did get
a couple of robust diplomatic slaps from Brazil’s foreign minister,
Celso Armorim, rejecting Mrs Clinton’s hostile references to Venezuela
and calls for tougher action towards Iran.
Amid detailed news reports of butchered activists in Tegucigalpa, Latin
Americans and even some Democratic members of the US Congress listened
incredulously to Mrs Clinton’s brazen hosannas to the supposedly
violence-free election of Honduras’ new, US-sanctioned President Lobo
in a process to which both the Organisation of American States and
the European Union refused to lend the sanction of official observers.
Meanwhile China signals its displeasure at the US with stentorian
protests about Obama’s friendliness towards the Dalai Lama. The
People’s Republic continues its rumblings about shrinking its vast
position in US Treasury bonds.
The Turks recall their ambassador from Washington in the wake of a
vote in a US congressional committee to recognise the massacre of
the Armenians in 1916 as "genocide".
Russia signals its grave displeasure at Mrs Clinton’s rejection,
in a speech at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, of President Medvedev’s
proposal to negotiate a new security pact for Europe. "We object to
any spheres of influence claimed in Europe in which one country seeks
to control another’s future," she said.
Shortly before this categorical statement, Poland announced that the
US would deploy Patriot missiles on its territory, less than 50 miles
from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.
Is this partial list a reflection of incompetence, or a registration
that, with a minor hiccup or two, US foreign policy under Obama is
moving purposefully forward in its basic enterprise: to restore US
credibility in the world theatre as the planet’s premier power after
eight years of poor management?
Consider the situation that this Democratic president inherited. In
January 2009, the world was reeling amidst violent economic
contraction. Obituaries for the American Century were a dime a dozen.
The US dollar’s future as the world’s reserve currency was written
off with shouts of derision. Imperial adventuring, as in the 2003
invasion of Iraq, was routinely denounced as fit only for Kipling
buffs. The progressives who voted Obama in were flushed with triumph
and expectation.
Not much more than a year later Obama has smoothed off the rough edges
of Bush-era foreign policy, while preserving and indeed widening its
goals, those in place through the entire post-war era since 1945.
Latin America? Enough of talk about a new era, led by Chavez of
Venezuela, Morales of Bolivia and other progressive leaders. So far as
Uncle Sam is concerned, this is still his backyard. On the campaign
trail in 2008 it was Republican John McCain who was reviled as the
lobbyist for Colombia’s death squad patron, president Uribe. Today,
it’s Obama who presides over an adamantly pro-Uribe policy, supervising
a widening of US military basing facilities in Colombia.
As an early signal of continuity, Honduras’ impertinent president
Zelaya, guilty of populist thoughts, was briskly evicted with US
approval and behind-the-scenes stage management.
If ever there was a nation for whose enduring misery the US bears
irrefutable responsibility (along with France) it is Haiti. The
hovels which fell down in the earthquake were those of people rendered
destitute by US policies since Jefferson, and most notably by the man
to whom Obama is most often compared, another Nobel peace prize-winning
US president, Woodrow Wilson.
The houses that did not fall down in such numbers were those of the
affluent elites, most recently protected by Bill Clinton, who was
second only to Wilson in the horrors he sponsored in Haiti.
Yet under Obama the US is hailed as a merciful and generous provider
for the stricken nation, even though it has been Cuba and Venezuela
who have been the stalwarts, with doctors (in the case of Cuba) and
total debt forgiveness (in the case of Venezuela.) The US refused
such debt relief.
Israel? Not one substantive twitch has discommoded the benign support
of Israel by its patron, even though Obama stepped into power amidst
Israel’s methodical war crimes – later enumerated by Judge Goldstone
for the UN – in Gaza. Consistent US policy has been to advocate
a couple of mini-Bantustans for the Palestinians and under Obama
the US has endured no substantive opposition to this plan from its
major allies.
With Iran there is absolute continuity with the Bush years, sans
the noisy braggadocio of Cheney: assiduous and generally successful
diplomatic efforts to secure international agreement for deepening
sanctions; disinformation campaigns about Iran’s adherence to
international treaties, very much in the Bush style of 2002. In the
interests of overall US strategy in the region, Israel is held on
a leash.
No need to labour the obvious about Afghanistan: an enlarged US
expeditionary force engineered with one laughable pledge – earnestly
brandished by the progressives – that the troops will be home in
time for the elections of 2012. The US – and indeed world – anti-war
movements live only in memory. Earlier this week, Congressional
Democrats in the House could barely muster 60 votes against the
Afghan war.
Russia? Vice President Biden excited the foreign policy commentariat
with talk of a "reset" in posture towards Russia. Outside rhetoric,
there’s been no such reset – merely continuation of US policy since
the post-Soviet collapse. Last October Biden emphasised that the US
"will not tolerate" any "spheres of influence," nor Russia’s "veto
power" on the eastward expansion of NATO. Yet the US is involved in
retraining the Georgian army.
China may thunder about the Dalai Lama and Taiwan – but on the larger
stage the Middle Kingdom’s world heft is much exaggerated. The astute
China watcher Peter Lee hit the mark when he wrote recently in Asia
Times that "the US is cannily framing and choosing fights that unite
the US, the EU, and significant resource producers, and isolate China
and force it to defend unpopular positions alone. By my reading,
China is pretty much a one-trick pony in international affairs. It
offers economic partnership and cash. What it doesn’t have is what
the US has: military reach… heft in the global financial markets
(Beijing’s immense over-exposure to US government securities is,
I think, becoming less of an advantage and more of a liability),
or a large slate of loyal and effective allies in international
organisation."
The United States, as Lee points out, is also making "good progress
in pursuing the most destabilising initiative of the next 20 years:
encouragement of India’s rise from Afghanistan through to Myanmar as
a rival and distraction to China".
All of this is scarcely a catalogue of bumbledom. Obama is just
what the Empire needed. Plagued though it may be by deep structural
problems, he has improved its malign potential for harm – the first
duty of all US Presidents of whatever imagined political stripe.
â~@¢ Oscars in the Age of Obama
IF YOU WANT a signifier of the changed image of empire, and imperial
adventures in foreign lands, think about last Sunday’s six Oscars
for The Hurt Locker, including ones for best picture and best director.
The film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, said at the end of her acceptance
speech: "I’d like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military
who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and
around the world and may they come home safe."
Suppose Bigelow’s former husband, James Cameron, had won best director
for Avatar. There is surely no way Cameron would ever have dedicated
his Oscar to any soldiers, American or Canadian, serving as members
of the imperial coalition – volunteers all – in Iraq or Afghanistan,
unless they had defected to the other side or mutinied and been put
in the brig or were facing a firing squad for treason. There is also
surely no way that any movie about a serving unit in Iraq would have
been in the running for an Oscar back in Bush time.
I hoped Avatar would get a big Oscar rather than the consolation
ones for cinematography and special effects. It would have honoured
a truly uncompromising anti-war, anti-American Empire movie.
I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker and don’t plan to, having endured
more than one bomb-disposal film in my movie-going career. Also the
circumstances of the movie’s filming seemed distasteful, with scenes
shot in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. "We had these Blackwater
guys that were working with us in the Middle East and they taught us
like tactical maneuvers and stuff – how to just basically position
yourself and move with a gun," Hurt Locker actor Anthony Mackie told
the New York Times’ Melena Ryzik. "We were shooting in Palestinian
refugee camps. We were shooting in some pretty hard places. It wasn’t
like we were without enemies. There were people there looking at us,
‘cuz we were three guys in American military suits runnin’ around
with guns. It was nothing easy about it. It was always a compromising
situation."
After Jeremy Scahill wrote an item in The Nation about Blackwater’s
role, as disclosed by Ryzik, the author of The Hurt Locker’s
screenplay, Mark Boal, made haste to contact him to deny that
Blackwater had ever been hired in any capacity. Boal apparently
supervised all such hiring of military and security consultants.
Scahill asked him about comments made by the film’s director,
Kathryn Bigelow, in other interviews, mentioning the presence of
Blackwater personnel on set, including as technical advisers. "It’s
possible," Boal conceded, "that at some point somebody on set worked
for Blackwater, but we never hired Blackwater."
However, Melena Ryzik described Mackie showing her how the Blackwater
men trained him to hold his weapon. "If you’re a trained killer,"
Mackie told Ryzik, "you’re very precise." This is Blackwater-precision,
as displayed by the panic-stricken contractors when they mowed down
17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad in 2007.
But then, as Obama quoted in his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech
from his favourite intellectual and unappetising apologist for Empire,
Reinhold Niebuhr: "To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not
a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections
of man and the limits of reason."
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