[The following report is not your usual fare, when considered with the following link and more links below (SEE: Obama orders review of police militarization). Instead of my usual Obama-bashing, I have chosen an optimistic review of second-term Obama, hearkening back to my own last positive piece on Obama’s leadership, which was unlike all my other articles, it was written from a future perspective–after an imaginary moment which happened in October 2009–when Obama grew a backbone (SEE: Dreaming the World Awake).
Obama did set in motion a series of events in October, ’09, which did let in a little light of optimism–He vetoed Pentagon plans to multiply Afghan/Pakistani destruction (settling instead, for an escalation of drone strikes in FATA) and he stood-up to Israel (despite his quashing of the GOLDSTONE REPORT which can be read at NoSunglasses Library). Perhaps
HIGHLIGHTS FROM GOLDSTONE REPORT ON OPERATION CAST LEAD:
810. In reviewing the above incidents the Mission found in every case that the Israeli armed forces had carried out direct intentional strikes against civilians. The only exception is the shelling of the Abu Halima family home, where the Mission does not have sufficient information on the military situation prevailing at the time to reach a conclusion.
811. The Mission found that, on the basis of the facts it was able to ascertain, in none of the cases reviewed were there any grounds which could have reasonably induced the Israeli armed forces to assume that the civilians attacked were in fact taking a direct part in the hostilities and had thus lost their immunity against direct attacks.455
812. The Mission therefore finds that the Israeli armed forces have violated the prohibition under customary international law and reflected in article 51 (2) of Additional Protocol I that the civilian population as such will not be the object of attacks.
As reported at the time, the US was complicit in Israel’s war crimes in “Operation Cast Lead.” The previous worst destruction of the Gaza Strip, before the latest tragic series of Israeli war crimes.
I know that it may seem impossible to see optimism in Obama’s foreign policy at this point, but think how much more serious would be the Pentagon’s ongoing world war if Obama had let Special Ops freak McChrystal have his way in “AfPak.” The Mideast wars had to have happened in order to satisfy the gluttonous elite and their insatiable appetites for more. But now that five years have elapsed, a great antiwar groundswell is building up against Obama’s present and future wars, receiving better than average odds of success to prevail on Obama to resist the European/Internationalist elitists call to expand the terror war into Ukraine/Russia. as well as joint missions with the Syrian and Iraqi air forces to crush ISIS in both Arab nations.
Is it even possible for Obama to pull a ju-jitsu move against the Pentagon and the elite, by joining with the Presidents of Syria and Iraq to eliminate the Saudi/Qatari proxy army of fake Islamists? This may be what we are now experiencing.
That is the complex topic of the following report from Germany.]
Clinton, Obama and the new era of the American Empire
Norman Birnbaum
In a long interview in the Atlantic magazine, the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama has criticized. Specifically, it has stated that the situation in Syria, another would be if the United States had supplied the original democratic opposition to the Assad regime with weapons, and that Muslim fundamentalists with their fanatical violence then could not have come across in this gap. While Clinton spoke in the subjunctive, to give the impression of a rather hypothetical consideration, but nobody believes it. Her words were immediately and consistently understood as an expression of their formal, although unexplained, but absolutely obvious presidential campaign. They were a detachment from a supposedly unpopular president, who is often portrayed as an intellectual who lacks the will to defend the interests of the nation. The President hit back by extremely skeptical about it remarked, if the democratic opposition in Syria successful military violence of the Assad regime could resist. The President replied scathingly to the accusation that the American indecision have the jihadists in Iraq opened the door.
The direct departure from the policies they supported as Foreign Minister, however, was not the most striking aspect of the interview. It was a systematic statement of American nationalism, which, disguised as a moral and political leadership, reclaims global hegemony. Clinton did not hesitate to defend what she calls the “ugly” sides of the Cold War – but they did not count the States in which the United States had intervened frequently to install brutal regime or support that reliably anticommunist were. Under proposed as covert interference in democratic states. Finally, she testified, have you won the Cold War, which means that led to justifier. She sounded hard as Kissinger, but did not feel to have also its historical intelligence.
That the end of the Cold War established the supremacy of global peace and prosperity, Clinton leads back to the hopeless nature of nations and peoples who unfortunately did not have the same fate as the United States. Clinton attacked Putin and Russia as particularly flawed out, stressed that Israel is morally and politically exemplary, and spoke condescendingly about Europe, skeptical about the possibility of an agreement with Iran and remarkably silent to Asia – apart from the praise for Prime Minister Abe and its efforts to increase the proportion of women among Japanese workers. You would have thought that Abe could be homage to Japanese nationalism of interest to them. It is finally not the first graduate of Wellesley College near Boston, which is interested in world politics. She was already gone before someone from the Sen family, later the wife of Chiang Kai-Shek.
President Obama has recently taken a different approach in statements such as the interview with Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. He rejects explicitly from the view that the United States, so great its influence may be, their conceptions of the world could impose on others. He insists that there are many problems that are not solved by military means. States and peoples deceive themselves responsibility to overcome their own divisions. The United States had enough to do within their own borders and would, if they failed to solve their own tasks themselves become his own worst opponent. His words lacked the triumphalism of Clinton’s little original version of America’s uniqueness. No president since Kennedy (in his speech in 1963 in which he calls for the end of the Cold War) has so strongly defied the conventions of the elites of American foreign policy – where also their relentless denigration of our remarkably intelligent President stirred. However, he has some of the worst traditions of the Foreign Ministry apparatus and internal security made their own – especially with the unconstitutional surveillance of citizens and covert operations abroad, which are banned under our and international laws. Perhaps Kennedy’s fate has influenced him. A 10,000-mile journey begins with the first step, and he has made at least one of those first steps.
Clinton’s views are a return to the dogmatism that has let them be an enthusiastic supporter of a student for the furious provincialism of the prophets of the contemporary Republican imperialism, Senator Goldwater. The 1964 Republican presidential candidate was severely beaten by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won, not least because he accused Goldwater of wanting to expand American involvement in Vietnam – and then did of course itself promptly exactly Johnson later said that he knew that the war was not to win, but that he was afraid. have to be killed if he had withdrawn American troops.
Now Clinton is, as a student once critic of the Vietnam disaster, even to the point of a superficially modernized war party. She obviously thinks the anti-imperialist Democrats of the Obama coalition have no choice but to vote for them – and meanwhile, mobilized the millions who sullenly leave the decisions about war and peace to those who keep looking for something better. You could live in a time warp, the anti-war voters could stay home, or a sufficient number could be a third candidate the vote and thus allow the Republicans the presidency. The Republicans themselves could turn away from the ongoing warfare. Has this educated and intelligent person committed a large, even huge historical mistake? It assumes that the conditions of the last half century persist indefinitely, under which the United States has exercised a hegemony over large parts of the world. This is not the case. The much younger Obama has a far more realistic view of past, present and future. Your argument is even go further, when both have long since left the political stage. It is, in fact, the debate that will shape American policy in the next half century. Clinton shows the meantime a maximum of opportunism in an attempt to distance himself from Obama. His persistence in the prevention of war is really popular, and the public will support him sooner rather than later against his critics, which are omnipresent in the media. His unpopularity is exaggerated. Thirty percent of the nation will never accept him, in cultural (it is formed) and racially. Stay seventy percent – and support him as forty percent of the total electorate, he has a majority of those he can reach.
The United States is a religious nation, but in foreign policy is the basis not ‘vox populi vox dei’. There are profound national trends morally and religiously loaded self-representation, the obvious but are contradictory. U.S. citizens face the nation as ultimately invincible, but threatened constantly before. Hold national loyalty to a supreme good, but let that one ill-mannered collection of ethnic, ideological, racial and religious groups bend foreign policy. The armed forces are venerated, but our elites take good care, not to reinstate conscription: a primary reason for the withdrawal from Vietnam was mutiny in the armed forces. Our government agencies, the military, universities, research centers are full of experts on the last corner of the world – but a notable proportion of the nation is quite confused what historical details such as the exact identity of the protagonists of the Second World War is concerned.
The public usually leaves these matters to Congress and the President. The constitutional power of Congress to wage war, and its control function in terms of foreign and defense policy staggers dizzily since the Second World War. The President has a rather extraordinary leeway – if he can count on the support of the foreign policy elites. This is made up of those of the government, the media, the military and the universities that literally live almost from American Empire. Given the large parts of the financial world and industry joined with international interests. And then to get the lead squads of churches and ethnic groups, who defend moral interests.
In recent decades the tendency has to moralize reinforced by a new lobby of human rights defenders (such as UN ambassador Samantha Power and the National Security Advisor Susan Rice). The exceptional strength of the Israel lobby, where but only two percent of the population are Jews can be explained by the alliance with the Bible-believing Christians, Protestants, expecting a imminent end of the story – predicted in their apocalyptic visions by the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. That their fiery worldview brings the downfall of the Jews and the conversion of the rest with it worried the leaders of American Jewish organizations not too much. The future is uncertain, they explain, but in the real presence we have the support of about 25 percent of the nation. A wider interfaith alliance spreads fear and loathing of Islam, fueled by the attacks of September 11, 2001 – but already deeply imprinted in millions of unsuspecting heads. Our foreign policy is often characterized by smaller groups, lace up the larger alliances. The aging Cuban exile population is still able to determine our grotesque hostility with Cuba. If the Kubano-American chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Senator Mendenez, demands that NATO should support Ukraine, he intends thereby to maintain a high degree of tension to prevent peaceful co-existence in the Caribbean.
The state is currently more on its military than during the Cold War. Each contract for new weapons, any establishment of military facilities leads to local economic interests, which are reflected immediately in support for the Congress. Think. Against Keynes’ remarks about the benefits of pyramid construction The American equivalents are whole fleets of aircraft that can not fly, or gigantic aircraft carriers, which are vulnerable to diver. Our senior officials can not be held responsible for the maintenance of a permanent war economy. Many are formed and reflected and quite aware of the civil and economic foundations of world power. A significant presence of Catholics in the officer corps sensitized our admirals and generals often more for the principles of just war and the moral imperatives of proportionality in the use of force than many politicians. Nonetheless, the military component of the external apparatus to the provisos reasonable judgment seems to be immune.
Against this backdrop, Obama deserves praise for what he has achieved with the withdrawal from Iraq, the refusal to wage a war against Iran, and a small beginning of resistance against the excessive demands of Israel. He has managed to dampen the ever-present danger of an escalation of confrontation with China something and the Napoleonic fantasies Rasmussen to punish them with the contempt it deserves. He has not used his presidency for a larger educational campaign to encourage a national rethinking. This thing has him Clinton, who says to be sure to speak to both the elites and the general public, proved no service. With their recent challenge has forced him open to talk than in the previous five and a half years of his presidency. He still has two years and five months at the White House. Still enough time so for him to speak with greater clarity, while the scattered groups that are looking for a new America’s role in the world, prepare for moral and political efforts that Clinton is unable to address. More openness Obama could also lead to other candidates are encouraged to apply for the nomination for the Democratic presidential candidate for the election to 2016. In any case, the more Democrats will look for alternatives, the more Clinton is talking about.
ThereAreNoSunglasses 