Running Dog Obama

by Paul Street; July 29, 2007 - Empire and Inequality Report, No, 24
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&Ite...

Barack Obama’s most recent attempt to prove his Harvard-certified safety to the doctrinal gatekeepers of the U.S. foreign policy establishment ought to make it clear once and for all that he is what the Maoists used to call a "running dog lackey of United States imperialism."

WHITEWASHING PAST IMPERIAL CRIMINALITY

I am referring to Obama’s July/August Foreign Affairs essay, titled “Renewing America’s Leadership” (Obama 2007).

Reading as much like a campaign speech as an academic or policy document, this 5000-word article begins by praising Franklin Delano Roosevelt for “buil[ding] the most formidable military the world had ever known” and for giving “purpose to our struggle against fascism” with his “Four Freedoms.”

It praises Harry Truman for “champion[ing] a bold new architecture to respond to the Soviet threat -- one that paired military strength with the Marshall Plan and helped secure the peace and well-being of nations around the world.”

It commends Obama’s special historical role model John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) for “moderniz[ing] our military doctrine, strengthen[ing] our conventional forces, and creat[ing] the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress” to "show people everywhere America at its best" while “colonialism crumbled and the Soviet Union achieved effective nuclear parity.”

“Our Struggle Against Fascism”

Funny how Obama didn’t actually break-out the “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom of worship. Maybe that’s because the United States policymakers from Roosevelt II through Kennedy (and beyond) regularly violated most of them in the enforcement of their particular imperial concept of the “national interest.” During the middle and late 1930s, US policymakers helped enable the rise of European fascism that culminated in Hitler’s march of terror. The US watched with approval as Fascist darkness set over Europe during the inter-war years. American policymakers saw Italian, Spanish, German and other strains of the European fascist disease as a welcome counter to “the Soviet threat” – essentially the demonstration Russia made of the possibilities for national [development] outside the capitalist world system – and to Left movements, parties and related social-democratic policy drifts within Western Europe.

In 1937, Roosevelt’s U.S. State Department’s European Division argued that European fascism was compatible with America’s economic interests. This key diplomatic agency reported that fascism’s rise was a natural response of “the rich and middle classes” to the threat posed by “dissatisfied masses,” who, with “the example of the Russian Revolution before them,” might “swing to the left.” Fascism, the State Department argued, “must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle class, will again turn to the left.” The French Popular Front government of the middle 1930s was an example of the democratic socialist threat that made fascism acceptable to American officials before Hitler launched his drive for a New World Order.

It is true that fascism became an avowed U.S. enemy during WWII. This did not occur, however, until fascism, holding power in two leading imperialist states, directly attacked U.S. interests. American policymakers intervened against fascism on the basis of perceived national self-interest, not out of any particular concern for the human rights of the French or, for that matter, European Jews or anyone else (Zinn 2003, pp. 407-410; Chomsky 1991, pp. 37-42).

After the war, America’s accommodation of European and Asian fascism in the inter-war period became something of a model for U.S. Third World policy. In the name of resisting supposedly expansionist Soviet influence and anti-capitalism, the U.S. sponsored, funded, equipped, and provided political cover for numerous “Third World fascist” regimes. In doing so, it enlisted and protected numerous Nazi War criminals (e.g. Klaus Barbie) with anti-Left “counter-insurgency” skills deemed useful by “the Good War’s” victorious empire.

“The Greatest Thing in History”

The post-World War II era and the Cold War began with Truman’s perpetration of one of the greatest war crimes in history. He ordered the monumentally mass-murderous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki well after U.S. authorities knew that Japan was decisively defeated and looking to surrender. He did so with full knowledge that the Japanese only required assurances that the institution of the Emperor could be permitted to remain intact – a condition he agreed to meet after but not before dropping the bombs. Upon learning about the destruction of Hiroshima, he remarked, “this is the greatest thing in history.” His decision to use the atom bomb was about advancing U.S. global power vis-à-vis Russia and the rest of the world in the post-WWII era. It was not about saving American or Japanese lives (Alperovitz 1995).

The Cold War Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ determination to use nuclear weapons as a tool of unilateral imperial advancement hatched a nuclear arms race that almost turned fatal in October of 1962. We are still living with the lethal consequences of that arms race, which could have been prevented if the U.S. had put atomic power to internationalist and multilateral instead of murderous and imperial use. The arch-Cold Warrior Kennedy was an especially dangerous transgressor. He rode into the White House partly on the transparently false “missile gap” campaign suggestion that the Eisenhower administration had “permitted” the Soviet Union to achieve nuclear parity with the U.S – a great deception that Obama revealingly embraces 47 years later.

“Scaring the Hell Out of the American People”

“Greatest Generation” U.S. planners and policy makers continued with the restoration of fascist power in “liberated” Italy and intervened for elite class rule and against popular social revolution in the Balkans. In proclaiming the militantly U.S.-globalist Truman Doctrine, the Truman administration smeared democratic struggles in Greece as a Soviet “Communist” export. It did this in order to “Scare the Hell out of the American people” so they would accept the permanent imperial re-militarization of U.S. society and policy – helping thereby to sustain and expand the powerful “military industrial complex” that Dwight Eisenhower left the White House warning Americans about.

Consistent with that goal, Truman and two key members of his cabinet, including George Marshall “systematically deceived Congress and the public into thinking that the USSR was about to launch World Wear III with an invasion of Europe in 1948.” They did this, Frank Kofsky has shown, in order “to push through their foreign policy program, inaugurate a huge military buildup and bail out the near bankrupt airline industry” (Kofsky 1993).

The Real “Soviet Threat”: Who Deterred Who?

From the Truman Doctrine on, the basic Cold War pattern was set for the U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across the planet. Some of the most egregious subsequent examples – the Bushcons did not invent “regime change” - came in Iran (CIA coup 1953), Guatemala (U.S.-sponsored and directed coup and military takeover 1954), Chile (U.S.-sponsored coup and military takeover, 1973), Indonesia (U.S. sponsored military takeover 1965) are just some of the more spectacular examples in a long list. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, leftists and intellectuals paid with their lives for the U.S. campaign against independent development and social justice in the Third World.

When Third World proxies were unavailable or inadequate for the task of “deterring democracy” (Chomsky 1991) in the Third World, U.S. forces intervened directly with massive assaults, as in Korea (1950-1954) and Vietnam (1962-1975). The latter assault, which killed 3 million Indochinese and destroyed Vietnam’s capacity for independent development beyond Western supervision (the point of the U.S. attack), was fundamentally “escalated from state terror to aggression” (Chomsky 1993, p.1) by the Kennedy administration

Cuba was spared such direct U.S. intervention largely because the Soviet Union deterred the United States from launching a full-scale attack on the Cuban Revolution. Kennedy was forced to stand down from a planned invasion but continued to maintain major and provocative terrorist operations (under the guise of “Operation Mongoose”) in Cuba during and after the missile crisis of 1962 (Chomsky 2002, pp. 7-9). .

In the U.S.-USSR Cold War relationship, it was the Soviets not the Americans who are most accurately described as the great power exercising deterrence against a globally ambitious other – a basic truth unmentionable outside officially marginal circles (Chomsky 1991, pp.9-68).

Washington consistently justified its post-WWII record of global criminality with a great myth that Obama naturally embraces: the Soviet-“communist” campaign for world conquest. But honest U.S. assessments at the time acknowledged that the real Soviet danger was rather different. It was that the USSR modeled the possibility of independent national development beyond the parameters of U.S.-led world-capitalist supervision. The actual "Soviet threat" arose not from any Soviet commitment to world revolution (long since abandoned with the defeat of Trotsky) but from “Marxist” Russia’s determination to follow its own path and its concomitant refusal “to complement the industrial economies of the West” (Chomsky 1991, p. 27).

This refusal was a terrible example for the Third World, as far as leading Truman and Eisenhower planners like George Kennan and Dean Acheson – both warmly praised in past Obama publications and speeches (see for example Obama 2006, pp. 284, 304) – were concerned. The illusory Soviet quest for “world domination” and the related “domino theory” were always covers for the real specter haunting "Greatest Generation" planners in the post-WWII world: the danger that peripheral states would choose to follow their own autonomous road of development, outside and against the selfish, world-systemic needs of the state-capitalist core, run by and for the United States (Chomsky 1995, pp. 78-82, 91-93).

“To Maintain This Position of Disparity”.

To grasp some of the lovely “Four Freedoms” sentiment behind such supposedly benevolent U.S. Cold War policies as the sponsorship of vicious military dictatorships in Indonesia, Iran, Greece and Brazil (to name just a few U.S. “Free World” partners), we can consult an interesting formulation from Obama’s wise “Wilsonian” hero George Kennan (see Obama 2006, p, 284). As Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23, crafted for the State Department planning staff in 1948:

“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…to do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…We should cease to talk about vague and …unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better….we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government” (Quoted in Chomsky 1995, pp. 9-11)

The Marshall Plan, the U.S. reconstruction project for the war-ravaged European core, was loaded with selfish imperial content. U.S. assistance was predicated on investment and purchasing rules that favored U.S.-based corporations and on the political marginalization of Left parties that had gained prestige leading the fight against fascist forces the U.S. had initially welcomed as counters to the European Left. The U.S. military stood ready to intervene directly in the event of Left electoral victories in Western Europe.

Throughout the American “struggle against fascism” – a war won primarily by the workers, soldiers and peasants of the Soviet Union – U.S. planners worked behind the scenes to make sure that the U.S. would emerge as the unchallenged hegemon in the world investment and trading system (Zinn 2003, p. 413).

In a similar vein, JFK’s Alliance for Progress was all about defeating the Cuban-inspired specter of Leftist and independent development and entrenching the power of U.S-sponsored oligarchs and militaries in Latin America. It never delivered on its false promises of significant land reform and economic development for the Latin American people (Miroff 1976, pp. 110-142).

Yes, by all means, let us hail FDR, Harry Hiroshima Truman, and JFK and their magnificent contributions to “the peace and well-being of nations around the world.”

EVADING AND JUSTIFYING CURRENT IMPERIAL CRIMINALITY

Does it matter if Obama whitewashes past imperial U.S. violence and propaganda? Of course it does. Those who forget, delete, deny or condone past imperial (and other) crimes and deceptions are likely to commit and justify new such deadly transgressions in the future if they attain the power to do so. You can learn a lot about what a policymaker and politician will do in the present and future by knowing his or her take on the all-too living past.

“To Leave Iraq a Better Place”

As it happens, Obama’s Foreign Affairs article contains more than dubious historical reflection to feed suspicions that he (like Hillary and perhaps John Edwards – see Street 2007a and Street 2007b) can be expected to fulfill Maoist expectations if he reaches the imperial throne. Moving from the supposedly glorious post-WWII past he wants to restore (“we can be [Kennedy’s] America again” he says) to the shameful present, when an especially clumsy and stubborn Republican administration has dropped the ball of Empire. Obama criticizes fellow Harvard graduate George W. Bush for “respond[ing] to the unconventional attacks of 9/11 with conventional thinking of the past, largely viewing problems as state-based and principally amenable to military solutions. It was this tragically misguided view,” Obama claims, “that led us into a war in Iraq that never should have been authorized and never should have been waged.”

Obama rips the White House for trying to “impose a military solution on a civil war between Sunni and Shiite factions."

"The best chance we have to leave Iraq a better place,” Obama says, “is to pressure these warring parties to find a lasting political solution.” He argues that “only Iraqi leaders can bring real peace and stability to their country.” “We must make it clear we seek no permanent military bases in Iraq,” Obama ads.

Too bad the Cheney-Bush administration did not invade Iraq in “response” to 9/11 or to “leave Iraq a better place.” It exploited the “unconventional attacks” to launch an illegal, one-sided and state-based war of colonial occupation – long sought by neoconservative Bush insiders – to deepen U.S. control over Iraq and the Middle East’s stupendous, strategically hyper-significant energy resources. It was the longstanding and bipartisan petro-imperialist ambitions of our foreign policymaking class that “led us” into the war.

Those ambitions and that “war” had and have nothing to do with improving Iraqi’s lives and have predictably deepened the crisis of Iraqi “life” – a long-running catastrophe the U.S. has been fueling since at least the 1980s. The occupation has involved the building of a large number of in fact permanent military bases that an Obama (or a Hillary Clinton or Edwards or Richardson) presidency would never dismantle, as is suggested by the Senator’s claim that he would maintain an “over-the-horizon military force in the region to protect American personnel and facilities” inside Iraq.

Too bad Obama’s superficially generous statement that Iraqi leaders alone can stabilize and pacify their country deletes the uncomfortable fact that the U.S. assault is the main force that has torn Iraqi apart and generated a civil war that has often been fanned quite directly by U.S. occupation authorities. Also lost in Obama’s translation is the elementary moral fact that the U.S. owes Iraq massive reparations – to be configured and used in accord with the Iraqis’ needs.

“This Enemy Operates Globally”

Obama praises “our servicemen and servicewomen” for “perform[ing] admirably while sacrificing immeasurably.” Then he vilifies Islamic jihadists who “reject modernity, oppose America, and distort Islam” and who have “killed and mutilated tens of thousands of people just this decade. Because this enemy operates globally,” he observes "it must be confronted globally."

Too bad the illegal U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan (Obama and other leading Democrats never criticize the latter colonial operation) have killed HUNDREDS of thousands of innocent Arab, Pashtun and other Southwest Asian civilians, helping explain why millions of Middle Eastern and Muslim people “oppose America[‘s]” Islam-distorting assault and support defensive jihad against Washington’s imperial invaders, policies, and structures.

With over 700 military bases located in nearly every planet on the earth and a “defense” budget that accounts for roughly half the world’s military spending, the United States seems to most of the world’s population to be the relevant “enemy” who “operates globally.”

And it’s too bad that "our" troops’ “admirable performance” in service to Bush’s imperial mission has involved shocking racist and imperial violence against civilians. As Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian report in the July 30th edition of The Nation, the occupation is “a dark and depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.”

Many of fifty U.S. occupation veterans interviewed by Hedges and Al-Arian have “returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the U.S. government and media.” By returning GIs’ account, the war on the ground includes the gratuitous killing and torture of Iraqi civilians, including children. The invasion involves the routine “indiscriminate” application of U.S. force and numerous “disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops.”

“I guess while I was there [in Iraq],” one returning occupation soldier (Jeff Englehart, former Specialist, Third Brigade, First U.S. Army Infantry Division) told Hedges and Al-Arian, “the general attitude was 'a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi'. You know, so what?”

Numerous veterans “described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.”

“We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs,” Hedges and Al-Arian report, “that some soldiers had so lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian corpses.”

Twenty four veterans “said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported.”

The killing of “unarmed Iraqis” is “so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape.”

Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where U.S. soldiers would “plant AK-47s” next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis they had butchered “to make it seem as if the civilian dead were combatants” (Hedges and Al-Arian 2007)

“Mom, we killed women on the street today,” one U.S. soldier recently reported from Iraq. “We killed kids on bikes” (Urbina 2007).

If such savage criminality (ultimately traceable to top decision-makers in Washington) is what comes out of the United States’ purportedly advanced culture of “modernity,” we should not be mystified if many Middle Eastern people might wish for a pre-“modern” time when the region might be free of Americia's supposed civilizing mission.

The Middle East’s “Only Established Democracy”

Obama calls for the U.S. to “focus our attention and influence on the festering conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians -- a task that the Bush administration neglected for years. “Our starting point,” Obama says, “must always be a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel, our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy.”

Too bad the increasingly militarized and regressive Israeli “democracy,” whose “security” is Obama’s declared first priority (“starting point”), rests on the racist, U.S.-protected occupation of Arab/Palestinian land – an occupation the American U.S. foreign policy establishment deeply supports.

The False Specter of “Isolationism”

Voicing an especially recurrent theme of his (see Obama 2006, pp. 303-304; Obama 2006a), Obama cautions Americans against becoming so disillusioned by Bush II’s foreign policy that they fall into the dangerous clutches of "isolationism." “After thousands of lives lost and billions of dollars spent,” Obama says, “many Americans may be tempted to turn inward and cede our leadership in world affairs. But this,” the junior Senator from Illinois warns, “is a mistake we must not make. America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, and the world cannot meet them without America.”

Never mind that Americans are not veering towards isolationism. They support neither aggressive unilateral U.S. imperialism nor isolationism but an enlightened and democratic internationalism that honors international law and shows respect for the wishes of others (see for example Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 2004).

It is interesting that Obama measures the Iraq War body count in the “thousands” while accusing Islamo-terrorists of “killing and maiming tens of thousands.” His use of the word “thousands” means that he sees imperial U.S. troops as the only mention-worthy victims in the Iraq War. He deletes the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who have lost their lives in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Those deaths – like those of the one million or so Iraqis George Bush I and the “recognizably progressive if modest” (Obama 2006, pp. 34-35) Bill Clinton killed with “economic sanctions” during the 1990s – provide critical context for understanding why millions of Muslims and Middle Easterners “oppose America.”

PROMISING FUTURE IMPERIAL CRIMINALITY

Obama’s Foreign Affairs article gives people and states beyond U.S. borders strong reasons to fear the prospect of a United States with running dog Obama at the helm. “The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew,” Obama proclaims, adding that “we must lead the world by deed and by example” and “must not rule out using military force” in pursuit of “our vital interests.”

The last three words harken back to another Democratic imperialist’s “Carter Doctrine” (which updated the Monroe Doctrine for the global petro-capitalist era to include the Persian Gulf region in the United States’ inviolable sphere of special interest and unilateral action) and are a code phrase for other nations' oil, located primarily in the Middle East.

“A strong military,” Obama says, “is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace,” echoing George Orwell’s fictional totalitarian state of Oceana, which proclaimed that “War is Peace” and “Love is Hate.”

We must “revitalize our military” (to foster peace), Obama declares, partly by adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 to the Marines.

Do not rule out future overseas occupations carried out in the name of the “war on terror” by an Obama White House. “We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests,” Obama pronounces. “But we must also become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to take on foes that fight asymmetrical and highly adaptive campaigns on a global scale.”

Reassuring the bipartisan imperialist establishment that he will not be hamstrung by international law and civilized norms when “our vital interests” (other peoples’ petroleum, primarily) are "at stake," Obama says that “I will not hesitate to use force unilaterally, if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests wherever we are attacked or imminently threatened.”

Prepare to take cover, if you can, subject peoples of the oil-rich periphery!

And do not rule out pre-emptive and even so-called preventive wars with Obama at the helm. “We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense,” the junior Senator who would be Emperor declares, “in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability -- to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities.”

Sound familiar?

Paul Street is an anti-centrist political commentator located in the Midwestern center of the United States. Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) Street’s next book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com

SELECTED SOURCES

Gar Alperovitz 1995. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1995).

Chicago Council on Foreign Relations 2004. Global Views (October 2004).

Noam Chomsky 1991. Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991),

Noam Chomsky 1993. Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and U.S. Political Culture (Boston, MA: South End, 1993).

Noam Chomsky 1995. What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Berkeley CA, 1995)

Noam Chomsky 2002. Understanding Power (New York: New Press, 2002).

Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian 2007. "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," The Nation (July 30, 2007).

Frank Kofsky 1993. Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).

Bruce Mirroff 1976. Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (New York: Longman’s, 1976).

Barack Obama 2006. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006).

Barack Obama 2006a. “A Way Forward in Iraq,” Speech to Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Chicago Illinois (November 20, 2006), available online at http://obama.senate.gov/speech/061120-a_way_forward _in_iraq/index.html.

Barack Obama 2007. “Renewing American Leadership,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007), read online at http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701faessay86401/barack-ob....

Paul Street 2004. “Keynote Reflections,” ZNet (July 29 2004), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5951.

Paul Street 2007a. “ ‘Imperial Temptations:’ John Edwards, Barack Obama and the Myth of Post World War II U.S. Benevolence,” Dissident Voice (June 2, 2007), read online at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/06/john-edwards-barack-ob... and History News Network (June 2, 2007) at http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/39738.html

Paul Street 2007b. “Hillary’s War and the Next 9/11,” ZNet (July 5 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13215.

Paul Street 2007c. “Obama’s White Appeal and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Black Agenda Report (June 20 2007), read online at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_conten....

Paul Street 2007d. “John Edwards and Dominant Media’s Selective Skewering of Populist Hypocrisy,” ZNet (June 29 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13177.

Ian Urbina 2007. "Even as Loved Ones Fight On, War Doubts Arise," New York Times, 15 July 2007, p. A1.

Howard Zinn 2003. A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present (New York: HarperPerennial 2003).