Obama's Imperial Continuity

Obama's Imperial Continuity

DESPITE THE RHETORIC of hope and promises of “change we can believe in” that ushered him into the White House, Barack Obama has offered anything but a marked shift in the fundamental course of U.S. foreign policy. The change Obama has brought — to the relief of U.S. and global elites — is away from the George W. Bush-era fantasy that U.S. military firepower and ideological muscle could unilaterally dominate the globe. But his underlying policy goals are very much in continuity not only with Bush but with a century of his predecessors.

For those ruling elites deeply concerned with the challenges facing the U.S. economy on the global scale and wary of the unilateral adventurism of the preceding eight years, Obama appeared to offer a more “winnable” approach to maintain U.S. “leadership” and advance “national interest.” He never promised a departure from the mainstream currents of U.S. global reach, despite rhetorical flourishes to captivate those who, tired of Bush-Cheney, had somehow come to imagine otherwise or who weren’t paying close attention.

There certainly was talk of a new multilateralism prior to and immediately following the January 2009 inauguration. In a signature move, the new administration moved away from Bush’s extreme and absurd provocation of stationing “missile defense” on Russia’s borders, signaling at least that Russia would no longer be treated with arrogant contempt.

This was accompanied by calls for renewed cooperation with traditional European allies and the stated willingness to dialogue with the formerly demonized “rogue states” Iran, North Korea and Cuba. Those speeches always offered junior partner status to friends old and new, and a negotiation starting point of “an offer you can’t refuse” for perceived adversaries.

The new administration has kept one campaign promise. It scaled back and redeployed the number of ground troops in Iraq (now “only” 100,000 with an equal number of contractors) and shifted the imperial war effort and attention toward the “right war” in Afghanistan. President Obama increased the number of “boots on the ground,” escalated drone attacks and pressured Pakistan’s dependent Zardari regime to move against al-Qaeda and the domestic Taliban in what’s now commonly referred to as the “Af-Pak theater.”

On the western front the Israelis under Benjamin Netanyahu, feeling safe in their assumptions of unwavering U.S. support, proceeded with new settlement construction in the West Bank, the crippling siege of Hamas-governed Gaza, and the ongoing cooptation of the Palestinian Authority.

The crisis that has erupted over settlement expansion in East Jerusalem came about when Israel’s government miscalculated, blatantly disregarding America’s need to preserve the appearance of a “peace process,” even one that never brings peace.

Following some initial public talk of “a willingness to sit down” with Iran, the administration has “stiffened resolve” against an Iranian regime which remains determined in its right to proceed down the nuclear path but is fractured internally by deepening leadership fissures, social tensions and political protest. White House calls for increased international sanctions against Iran are strengthened by its more multilateral, less frighteningly, militarist stance.

Backward Beyond Bush-Cheney

Obviously the complex problems for the U.S. imperial project in Southwest and Central Asia are not of Obama’s making. But the current administration’s global posture can best be understood in a context extending far beyond the Bush-Cheney years. It must be viewed as a continuation, in no way a departure, of that longer quest for U.S. global supremacy dating to the beginning of the 20th century. Obama’s espoused liberal interventionism certainly harkens back to John F. Kennedy, if not all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.

Among global strategists embedded in what is now commonly referred to as the National Security State bureaucracies, there has long been a foreign policy consensus, shared since World War II, regarding the geo-strategic value of the “Greater Middle East.” State Department planners, their strategic sights fixed on supplanting British and French colonial rule in the oil rich Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, mapped a course for U.S. postwar imperial power even as World War II raged.

Already certain of victory and unassailable postwar strength, they soon turned toward the creation of strategic alliances with compliant regimes, bolstered with economic aid, arms and intelligence, to hamper authentic independence and social revolution in the region and to block any advances by the wartime-allied Soviet Union.

Publicly articulated as defense against an expansionist Russia, the 1947 Truman Doctrine, announced at the height of crises in Greece and Turkey proclaimed the right to intervene anywhere in the region “in defense of freedom.”

In the early postwar years, various independent nationalist movements including those of Mossadegh’s Iran or Nasserite Egypt, often painted in the Cold War monochrome of “red,” were depicted as inimical to U.S. interests. Through the creation of the short-lived Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) among the signers of the 1955 “Baghdad Pact” — Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, and Great Britain which was already a junior partner — Washington backed an alliance of regimes forming a regional “northern tier” on the Soviet Union’s southern flank.

That decade also witnessed the 1958 incursion of 14,000 U.S. troops into Lebanon, sent ashore to bolster minority Christian Maronite predominance in a heightening internal conflict. To justify the move, the White House invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine which proclaimed a U.S. right to intervene in countries threatened by “international Communism.”

The following decade saw the beginning of the massive turn toward Israel as the 1967 war dealt a devastating blow to regional pan-Arabism and secular nationalism.

Carter Doctrine and “Arc of Crisis”

Current policy continues to be defined largely by that longer-term projection of U.S. power into the broader region. Most significant for our current understanding is the Carter Doctrine, articulated in 1980. Proclaimed in his State of the Union Address in January of that year, Jimmy Carter’s strategic policy pronouncement pledged to uphold U.S. “vital interests” in the Persian Gulf region by “any means necessary, including military force.”

This came in the immediate aftermath of the fall of U.S.-installed Shah Reza Pahlavi’s Iran dictatorship, at the time a heavily armed Cold War client on the Soviet Union’s southern frontier and a surrogate “regional gendarme” of counterrevolution. It also followed close on the heels of the Soviet military intervention in landlocked Afghanistan. Carter’s address portrayed this move as a first step in the Soviets’ quest for a warm water port via Pakistan, rather than an attempt to bolster a bordering client regime made increasingly unstable by the spread of an Islamist insurgency that was already receiving covert U.S. assistance.

Key architect of the Carter Doctrine was his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the “realist” rival to the Republican favorite, Henry Kissinger. By the later 1970s, prior to the Shah’s ouster and the Soviet military move into Afghanistan, Brzezinski had described an “arc of crisis” spanning north and eastward from the Horn of Africa, extending from Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia, across the Levant and Arabian Peninsula, and eastward through Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Brzezinski saw the vast area as absolutely vital to the U.S. “national interest” and under threat from secular, left-led nationalist or pan-Arab revolutionary movements under the sway or potential influence of the main Cold War rival.

Strategically pivotal was the Persian Gulf, outlet for a major portion of the world’s oil supply. This region, understood as essential to the capitalist world economy and “well-being” of “the West,” was now seemingly threatened by the “loss” of Iran and potential instability in allied Saudi Arabia.

A strategist with a constant eye on the “Great Game,” Brzezinski also viewed Central Asia in geo-strategic terms as a contested “core area” crucial to U.S. hegemony, to be secured and held from competing imperial rivals, present and future.

At the time Carter announced his doctrine, the United States was still reeling from the defeat in Vietnam. Its capacity to intervene militarily was politically hampered at home by the “Vietnam syndrome,” that deep-seated mass reluctance to send U.S. troops into combat. The end of the Cold War draft, won as a concession by the Nam-era antiwar movement, also constrained the ability to intervene.

In the Middle East and elsewhere there had already been a turn, begun under the “Nixon Doctrine,” toward the massive arming and military assistance to reactionary regional proxies, notably the Shah’s Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Gulf and including “regional lynchpins,” non-Arab Israel and Turkey. The Carter-Reagan presidencies also featured the turn toward “low intensity warfare” — the often clandestine support of counter-revolutionary surrogate forces globally — in the name of “security” and “stability.”

One result was the infamous “Iran-Contra Affair” — that mid-1980s web of illicit weapons sales to Iran, then at war with Iraq, and illegal funneling of resulting revenues to the U.S.-backed Contras attacking the Nicaraguan Revolution. Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, was then a key player as deputy to Reagan’s CIA Director, William Casey.

In response to the Iran crisis but with no significant military capabilities in the region, the Carter administration moved to create a tactically mobile Rapid Deployment Force capable of extinguishing global “brush fires.” The RDF eventually morphed into United States Central Command (CENTCOM), to this day militarily “responsible for US security interests in twenty nations of the Middle East and Central Asia” and currently under the command by General David Petraeus.

The Reagan years witnessed the funneling through Pakistan of massive U.S. support of arms and money to the then “valiant rebel freedom fighters,” the Afghan muhjahideen and international jihadis (among them Osama bin Laden), fighting the “good jihad” against the Soviet “Evil Empire.” Meanwhile to the west, the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war, initiated by a U.S.-assisted Saddam Hussein, took well over a million lives.

The “Shia Crescent”

With the implosion of the Soviet bloc, the major public justification for U.S. intervention across the “arc of crisis” — the threat of “Evil Empire” subversion and aggression — also disappeared.

So too did former East bloc material support, often erratic but real, for various secular nationalist and “anti-imperialist” movements. Their decline paralleled the ascent of Islamist formations such as the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad over an Israeli-defeated Palestine Liberation Organization.

Importantly, as the older rationales for continuing U.S. presence across the region vanished, new forms of resistance, mainly Islamist in form, moved to the fore. Unresolved crises, created in large part by the imperial project with all its legacies of uneven development and cultural intrusion, exacerbated further by unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the backing of repressive allies from Cairo and Riyadh to Kabul and Islamabad, led to further instability, new interventions and ongoing conflict.

The 1991 Gulf War, coming just as the Soviet Union imploded, placed a U.S. land army in the Arabian Peninsula. That military incursion came not just as a response to Saddam Hussein’s Kuwait land grab, but also as the first major test of U.S. power in the post-Cold War world: an assertion of U.S. might in the Gulf and “national resolve” to uphold the Carter Doctrine.

President Bush the Elder at the time proclaimed that the “Vietnam Syndrome could finally be laid to rest,” and that “America could once again stand tall.”

Then, with the Soviet “Red Menace” gone and communism seemingly relegated to “the end of history,” planners and ideologues spent more than a decade casting about for ways to redefine “American mission,” the best way to gain domestic and foreign support for an imperial project facing new global challenges. The “war on drugs” was tried, as was “humanitarian intervention.” The latter, used by George Bush I and his successors in the Clinton administration as the justification for sending an ill-fated contingent of 28,000 U.S. troops ashore in Somalia in 1993, became the primary rationale for the U.S.-led NATO coup de grâce to the former Yugoslavia.

But while it portrayed U.S. benevolence in favorable light, “humanitarian intervention” lacked the mobilizing capacity of earlier Cold War explanations. Its claims were contradicted by Clinton’s concurrent punishment of Iraq, the dual campaign of unabated air strikes and devastating sanctions, intended to force “regime change” from within.

Throughout the ‘90s, the older Cold War rhetoric of the “arc of crisis” was gradually refurbished and expanded upon to reemerge as the “arc of Islam.” Political Islam and “fundamentalism” replaced “communism” as the sole explanation for increasing unrest, instability and “terrorism” extending from Morocco and Algeria in the west to Indonesia and the Philippines in the east. The new peril to the Arab Middle East became an Iranian-backed Shiite militancy extending across a “Shia Crescent.”

With the shock and trauma of the September 11th attacks, the “war on terror” moved to the fore to mobilize support and justification for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the subsequent war and occupation of Iraq, and the related increase of surveillance and contraction of civil liberties and constitutional guarantees at home.

The Bush-Cheney administration’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric initially targeted Iran, North Korea and Syria, none of which had anything to do with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, as “state sponsors of terrorism” while it ignored the state terror of regional allies, most notably Israel but also including Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The “Bush Doctrine” turned to “preemptive war,” the unilateral right to militarily intervene against any regime of “failed state” posing a potential or perceived future threat. It ended, as we know, in disaster.

And Then Came Obama…

While promising change, Bush’s successor has displayed a ready willingness to utilize and adapt much of the rhetoric of his predecessors. Certainly not about to appear “soft” on the “war on terror,” Barack Obama as Commander-in-Chief and Imperial CEO has clearly delineated a foreign policy entirely in keeping with the long-established focus on U.S. global supremacy.

In three major addresses — at Cairo in early June, 2009 and then in quick succession at West Point and Oslo in December — Obama readily displayed the commitment to U.S. supremacy in a rapidly changing multi-polar world.

Delivered to a highly vetted audience in the sealed-off space of Cairo University, the June speech, while intending to set a tone of “not-Bush” reconciliation to the Muslim and Arab worlds, in large part reproduced in “kinder, gentler” form, the “clash of civilizations,” the Neoconservatives’ overarching explanation for the antagonisms between “the West” and Islam’s adherents.

While referencing a number of other sources of conflict and instability — among them colonialism and Cold War, “modernity,” “globalization” and “violent extremism” — Obama primarily portrayed the main sources of tension in cultural and religious terms and called for a coming together of “all people of good faith.”

In continuity with his predecessors, and not about to discuss U.S. strategic determination to remain hegemonic across the Greater Middle East, he described U.S. actions as if America were a reluctant victim once again forced to take action.

The Purple Prose of Cairo

In perhaps the most remarkable section of the Cairo address, Obama delivered a homily of sorts that must have seemed incredibly contradictory if not ludicrous to any listener attuned to Middle East history and present realities. While reaffirming unconditional support for Israel and a call for a return to the “road map,” he stated that, “The Palestinians must abandon violence.” Silent in regard to Israel’s disproportionate use of its military might and collective punishment, he asserted — only minutes after stating that the United States had its own origins in a justified rebellion against empire — that “resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.”

At a time when the new administration had already increased the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan through the escalating use of drone attacks, he went on to assert with no Orwellian subtlety lost: “violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children…That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.” As if those in the West Bank and Gaza or languishing in the refugee camps of Lebanon were somehow primarily responsible for their own plight and should not resist by any means necessary!

Conveniently avoiding Bush’s fraudulent claims about weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq war, Obama stated that the invasion and occupation of that country occurred solely to depose the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and that it left “the people of Iraq better off.” The Cairo address called for democracy (certainly the irony there could not have been lost among some of his audience of hand-picked Egyptian students), religious tolerance, women’s rights and nuclear arms control, with pointed comments aimed at Iran and no reference to Israel’s existing nuclear arsenal.

From West Point to Oslo

Obama formally announced another troop increase to Afghanistan, his second since coming to office, in a nationally televised presidential address delivered not from the Oval Office, but before the Cadets at West Point.

Although not appearing on an aircraft carrier deck in a flight suit, he repeated the “war on terror” trope of a menacing al-Qaeda, now abetted by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as the sole reason for escalating the U.S.-NATO war in Central Asia. “What’s at stake,” the Commander in Chief told us, “is not simply a test of NATO [meaning U.S.] credibility…but the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

Here we have once again a replay of the constant themes used to justify U.S. imperial interventions across the breadth of a century or more: the defense of an ally’s freedom and democracy from outside threat coupled with national security concerns. No mention of inconvenient realities about the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, American-installed, riddled with corruption and subsequently “reelected” in a massively fraudulent pseudo-election.

It was in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech at Oslo that Obama clearly laid out the direction of his presidency. He pointed to the contradictory irony of receiving the award while waging two ground wars of occupation in Asia. His war-is-peace address, while draped once again in the rhetorical flourishes of a revived liberal internationalism, served primarily as public relations justification and statement of imperial purpose to the rest of the world.

Couched in universal terms laden with the liberal interventionist moralism of a Woodrow Wilson or John Kennedy, the speech actually contained an air of imperial realism. At its center stood a call to redefine the notions of “just war” doctrine for use in legitimizing present and future armed interventions.

Obama cited the components of the longstanding set of principles, the basis of the UN Charter and older international accords — that force be used as last resort or in self-defense; that it be proportional and that civilians be spared “whenever possible.”

He then went on to speak of new global situations — the threat of civil wars, among them — requiring redefinitions of the concept. While differing in tone from the “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” of the preceding administration, Obama reiterated “the right of the United States to act unilaterally when necessary” (without defining who or what might define such “necessity”).

To provide international legitimacy for the escalating war in Afghanistan, he praised the current incarnation of the “coalition of the willing,” the 43 self-interested allies and lesser supplicant states gathered under the NATO banner. In truth, if the original rationale for the existence of NATO was that of Western Europe’s “protective shield” against “Soviet aggression,” then it should have disbanded long ago.

Obama at Oslo gave a remarkable and revealing historical sketch of the post World War decades when “America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace.” He cited the Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of a capitalist Western Europe under U.S. aegis, and the United Nations, long utilized by the United States when necessary and otherwise bypassed and ignored, as crowning achievements of the era.

A similar chord was struck in Obama’s Cairo speech, where he finished up with calls for mutual interest in cooperation in “economic development and opportunity,” a “broader engagement beyond concerns for oil” and requisite appeals for improved trust, friendship and increased scientific, educational and cultural exchanges.

This a refinement of the “Open Door,” that centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy since the beginning of the 20th century, first and foremost meaning American corporate access to markets everywhere. For an example of the progress and benefits this has brought, see Haiti.

War Is Peace

In Oslo, bypassing the long history of U.S. interventions on the side of dictatorship, numerous anti-democratic destabilization efforts across the planet (Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, Cuba in the 1960s) and various proxy wars (Nicaragua and Afghanistan in the 1980s among them), the Peace Prize Prez stated: “America has never fought a war against democracy and [that] our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens.”

The Korean War and Vietnam, and the nature of the U.S.-sponsored regimes in both, disappeared from memory, as did the present-day close friendships with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Afghanistan — interesting examples of “governments that protect the rights of their citizens” — and Israel whose 43-year record in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is in constant violation of human and democratic rights.

At the very time when the U.S. military was busy increasing the number of civilian casualties in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Commander in Chief could state without flinching,

“Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight.”

As the Imperial President drew to a close at Oslo, he noted that, “…No Holy War can be a just war.” He of course was referring to those Islamist elements, among them former allies now defined as “extremists.” He failed to address that other “holy war,” largely wrapped in the moralist secular garb of American mission, that ongoing pursuit and maintenance of U.S. strategic advantage in the “Greater Middle East” and elsewhere, the armed defense of global hegemony, an old world order now increasingly challenged economically if not militarily.

The world is a different place than during the Cold War. No longer divided between a capitalist “West” and the so-called “really existing socialism” of an “East,” the globe has divided into intertwined yet increasingly rival economic blocs — an ascendant Chinese growth engine with its East Asia sphere and expanding global reach, the European Union led by a unified Germany, a Russia back on its feet and a developing India — all of serious concern to U.S. capital.

Across the “Global South,” in Latin America and elsewhere, various “breakaway republics” no longer fully under superpower sway have slowly moved toward regional partnerships. The Obama administration has successfully eased Honduras back into safe channels, through a military coup and a pseudo-electoral transition to a new regime, keeping the repression and murder of popular activists mostly out of the headlines. Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, however, are harder to bring under control.

Other nations in Africa and the global South, still strapped by the legacies of colonial and neocolonial underdevelopment made worse by the recent global downturn and deteriorating environments, remain in a state of abject dependency to the capitalist centers. New instabilities, conflicts and forms of resistance, at their heart the result of imperial penetration, abound. Therein lie the challenges faced by U.S. ruling circles and their Imperial President as they seek those changes, advantageous for empire, they can believe in.

(This piece originally appeared in Against the Current 146, May-June 2010.)

A review in the latest Against the Current

U.S. & Israel: Dog Wags Tail Wags Dog
-Allen Ruff

Israel and the Clash of Civilizations Iraq, Iran, and the Plan to Remake the Middle East by Jonathan Cook
London & Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2008, 204 pages, $24.95 paper.

A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT of ink and energy has been expended interpreting the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel. The debate over Israel’s influence on U.S. Middle East policy has engaged critics across the political and ideological spectrum. While some have long questioned the reasons for the unparalleled U.S. military and economic support bestowed on the “Jewish state,” the debates over Israel’s influence on U.S. foreign policy have increased dramatically in the wake of Bush administration military responses to September 11th.

The invasion of Iraq especially, but also Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon and more recently the increasing escalation of war talk aimed at Iran, have added to the wide-ranging debates over Israel’s Washington clout.

Often overly deterministic, conspiratorial and at times downright vulgar, much of that recent discussion has focussed on the sway of the “neocons,” that clique of Israel allied imperial war hawks that ascended to power with the presidency of George W. Bush.

Ranging from the reactionary right which has always blamed some sinister cabal of disloyal Jews for leading the country astray, the “Israel debate” has included those of the center and left who have narrowly focused on the impact and power of the “Israel lobby,” convinced that the “Israeli tail wags the American dog.” At the opposite end have been those such as Noam Chomsky, who assert that an imperial United States ultimately calls the shots and that Israel essentially does its bidding as the obedient and indebted client and dependent.

Nazareth-based Jonathan Cook, long-time Middle East correspondent for the London Guardian and Observer, has entered this often acrimonious fray with his Israel and the Clash of Civilizations. Taking issue on one hand with those, like Harvard academics Mearsheimer and Walt, who have explained Israeli sway by primarily focusing on the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but also critical of those observers such as Chomsky who minimize the effect of Israel’s influence on U.S. policy, Cook has developed a somewhat more nuanced portrayal of the historic and contemporary symbiosis between the imperial power and its junior partner.

Cook does not minimize Israeli influence. While noting that a mutuality of interest has long existed within U.S. and Israeli ruling circles, he argues that the shared perspective between the ascendant neocons and the Israeli right has altered the strategic focus and modus operandi of U.S. operations in the region. He contends that the initial impetus for such a shift in goals and tactics came from the Israeli side, and that the Bush administration adopted an Israeli outlook developed over several decades.

In what way has U.S. policy for the region changed? First off, Cook tells us that the long-term guiding principle of U.S. imperial policy — the quest for social and political stability of compliant regimes, that prerequisite for safe investment and business opportunity — has been altered.
From Stability to Designed Chaos

For over a century if not earlier, U.S. strategists opted for “regime change,” the replacement of one ruling clique or “strong man” with another whenever and wherever national leaders or ruling parties denied free and open access to the “national interest” of capital or impeded broader U.S. geopolitical designs. Thus noncompliant and independent nationalist leaders were replaced with obedient clients around the globe, and especially in the Middle East — in Iran in 1953, Lebanon in 1958, Iraq in the same period and after, and elsewhere.

Cook tells us that this game has changed; “regime change,” the replacement of leadership at the top, has been displaced by “regime overthrow,” a chaotic situation of premeditated instability characterized by inter-communal and confessional sectarianism, ethnic, tribal and religious rivalry, partition and fragmentation, and resultant “all against all” civil war and violence as the counter to any secular nationalist project.

He contends that this reign of permanent reaction over the divided and conquered, a seemingly new guiding strategic principle of imperial rule forwarded by the Neocons, originated with the Israelis dating back to the 1980s.

Cook argues that the Israeli strategists early on came to understand how the destabilization of any and all Arab national projects, especially that of the Palestinians, would serve its strategic interests. Initially viewing secular Arab nationalism as the primary enemy but unable to foresee the eventual “blowback” that would occur, Tel Aviv’s tacticians aided and abetted the rise of inter-communal rivalries among the Palestinians with the early assistance to Hamas.

In Lebanon, Israel’s successive invasions and support for the Maronite Christians and their allies succeeded in neutralizing any possibility of a threat from the north (before the rise of Hezbollah, the direct result of Israeli aggression and occupation, that is.) The fragmentation and cantonization of the West Bank, Cook tells us, became the model for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Regarding Iraq, Cook asserts that civil war was not the terrible unforeseen consequence of the U.S. invasion but the intended outcome of the neocon strategy, its intent. The primary goal has been to dissolve the states in the Middle East through the encouragement of ethnic and religious discord.

With Iraq dismantled, the administration leveled its sights on Iran. The development of an Iranian nuclear capacity would shatter the regional monopoly held by Israel. A nuclear deterrent in Tehran, totally unacceptable in Tel Aviv, would radically alter the correlation of forces in the Middle East and that, more than any other factor, has led to the ratcheting up of the “war on terror” rhetoric.

Convergence, Not Hijacking

Avoiding the vulgar argument that Israel and its supporters basically “hijacked” U.S. foreign policy, Cook contends that Israel persuaded the neocons that their respective goals (Israel regional dominance and U.S. control of oil) were related and compatible.

Cautious in laying out his argument, he notes, first off, that “the relations between the neocons and Israel have always been dynamic; Israel did not simply sell a vision to the neocons and then seek its implementation.” Rather, the neocons “were persuaded of the basic Israeli strategy for dominating the Middle East (and that it was in both parties’ interests), and then set about devising their own policies to realize these goals.” (93)

He suggests that Israel, at times, found itself being dictated to by the neocons, or pushed to deliver on promises it struggled in practice to attain, such as during the summer, 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

The best part of Cook’s analysis centers on the evolution of the shared mutuality of concerns and interests between the United States and Israel that extends back long before the rise of the neocons. He also suggests, as does Chomsky, that those interests tend to diverge on occasion and that that difference in outlook has pitted different factions of the national security state against one another.

For example, Cook argues that the neocon war in the Middle East has not been waged merely to seize and assure control over the region’s oil, but to weaken the power of OPEC and its major player, the Saudis, long viewed by the neocons and their Israeli allies as a key adversary and supporter of anti-Zionist militants.

But there are also powerful players in Washington, New York and London who view Saudi stability and petrodollar investment in the West as vital to the overall well-being of global capital. And therein lays a key source of contention and opposition to the neocon project.

At some level, Cook’s argument regarding “regime overthrow” is provocative and certainly provides for some informed speculation regarding a number of recent events across the Middle East. What really was going on behind the scenes in Iraq during the most intense period of inter-communal Sunni-Shiite violence of 2006-2007, for example?

At the same time, one cannot help to think his vision is that of the journalist, rather than that of the historian. After all, “divide and conquer” is as old as empire. The Romans understood “regime change,” the replacement of non-compliant client rulers with those more subservient when possible. It never hesitated to play one tribe or nation off against another, setting them at each others’ throats when necessary.

The European imperial powers of the modern era also understood such basic principles of colonial rule. So have those practitioners of U.S. realpoltik, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, not exactly neocons, who have long been proponents of the “stability of instability.”

Regardless, Cook’s book is certainly worthwhile and should be read by all those seeking some deeper understanding of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel, especially as the imperial power plods ahead in its quest for strategic control of the Middle East and beyond.

ATC 138, January-February 2009.

Obama and the Empire

[The following article is scheduled to appear in the forthcoming AGAINST THE CURRENT, issue 136 (September-October 2008). For current and back issues of ATC, including analyses of the significance of the Obama campaign, go to www.solidarity-us.org]

AS BARACK OBAMA’S campaign shifted focus to battle John McCain following his victory over Hillary Clinton, various observers began to suggest that Obama had begun to “move to the center in order to get elected.” Supporters explained that shift as a necessary pragmatic step; others, airing varied degrees of disappointment, went so far as to suggest that he had somehow “lurched to the right.”

Despite such perceptions, Obama has certainly remained remarkably consistent in one area, namely the realm of foreign policy and his unflagging support for the U.S. imperial agenda. On the question of support for empire and the role of the United States in the world, the Democratic contender has barely budged. While sectors of liberal opinion and antiwar activists may feel disillusioned by his recent pronouncements, Obama’s record shows that those disappointed supporters have mainly engaged in self-deception.

In the New York Times of July 14 and in a major Washington speech the following day, delivered just ahead of a “fact finding” trip abroad that included stops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel/Palestine and Europe, the Democratic candidate detailed the "five goals essential to making America safer" that he would pursue as President. He spoke of putting an end to the war in Iraq; pursuing the “war on terror” against al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban; ending U.S. oil dependency; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and “rogue states;” and rebuilding U.S. alliances.

With whatever minor changes and refinements, those mid-July statements amounted to little more than the repetition of positions mapped out some time ago and articulated from the start of Obama’s campaign, most often to elite audiences in less public venues, and entirely within the “mainstream” of Democratic Party politics. While it remains impossible to know exactly what an Obama presidency would do to uphold and maintain U.S. imperial power, especially in the event of unforeseen new crises – nor how much he would continue George W. Bush’s obscene executive abuses of power under cover of the “War on Terror” -- the candidate’s positions have long conveyed the clear message that there will be little if any change in the overarching strategic course and direction of the imperial state.

Obama’s candidacy is historic in its symbolism: the potential election of a Black candidate as the chief executive of the global superpower. It has nothing to do with challenging the “right” of that superpower to dominate the world -- for the world’s own good, of course. Obama’s global outlook is firmly situated at the center of the long-established ruling class consensus on the U.S. prerogative to intervene anywhere and any time to make the world safe for capital, couched for public consumption, as always, in the rhetoric of “freedom,” “democracy” and “stability.”

In this sense, he personifies a deep strand of liberal interventionism with roots extending all the way back to the early “progressive” imperialism of a Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Given the disastrous results of the Bush regime’s ideologically-driven Iraq adventure and the impasse with Iran, however, Obama’s promised course appeals to most of the elites and the general population because it seems more “realistic” and less “unilateral.”

“Renewing American Leadership”

The Obama camp early on articulated its major foreign policy positions in the form of an address before the non-governmental and bi-partisan Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), historically the most important foreign policy formulating body outside the State Department.

Disseminated in the pages of the bi-monthly Foreign Affairs, the CFR’s immensely influential “international relations” house organ, that speech laid out the framework and strategic vision for its intended audience, the elite who’s who of the foreign policy establishment – those not only at the upper echelons of the foreign relations and national security state bureaucracies, but also the corps of think tank and academic policy wonks, and most importantly, the key CFR patrons from the “commanding heights” of the corporate world. (Barack Obama, “Renewing American Leadership” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007)

While certainly promising a change in direction from the current course of Bush failures and outright blunders, the piece very systematically promised to stay the grand strategic course of global predominance pursued by every President across the 20th century. At its heart, Obama’s strategic outlook pledged the continuation of a struggle to reclaim and guarantee U.S. imperial hegemony, euphemistically described as “leadership” throughout the CFR piece and elsewhere, in a world grown increasingly hostile to American domination.

This hostility is caused primarily, according to the candidate, by the arrogant unilateralist contempt for allies, failed diplomacy and mismanaged military adventurism of the Bush regime. Invoking Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy as the pantheon of a tough but enlightened liberal interventionism that supposedly carried the “torch of freedom” and the promise of “democracy” from World War II to victory in the Cold War, Obama promises a return to a pragmatic and rational revival of the United States as “the leader” of a “free world.”

Offering to reward friends (those in line with the U.S. agenda) and penalize foes (i.e. any opposition) and ready to “walk the walk” with an unsurpassed military to be augmented by tens of thousands of new soldiers, he assured his CFR audience of his willingness “to place boots on the ground” anywhere, with or (when necessary) without the support of those “partners” ready to follow the American “lead.” Steeped in the rhetoric of American global mission, Obama laid out a series of positions that must raise serious questions for those of his supporters who view authentic national self determination and an end to imperial meddling as the prerequisites for lasting peace and a stable and a more just international order.

“The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew. To see American power in terminal decline is to ignore America's great promise and historic purpose in the world,” he explained. Early in his address, Obama highlighted a litany of 21st century threats and challenges facing the empire.

…They come from weapons that can kill on a mass scale and from global terrorists who respond to alienation or perceived injustice with murderous nihilism. They come from rogue states allied to terrorists and from rising powers that could challenge both America and the international foundation of liberal democracy. They come from weak states that cannot control their territory or provide for their people. And they come from a warming planet that will spur new diseases, spawn more devastating natural disasters, and catalyze deadly conflicts….

Absolutely nowhere in this list of major international threats facing America was there a hint that the United States itself might have played a historic role, been directly involved or somehow complicit in shaping that dangerous world. Least of all is there any recognition that the American drive to dominate the world, including its energy resources, and the permanent war economy that is required for this, have anything to do with the looming catastrophe of the “warming planet”!

Rhetoric and national myth trump history. Couched in the post-Cold War discourse that defines “terrorism” and “rogue” or “failed states” as the major sources of global instability and insecurity, Obama’s entire essay assumes that the U.S. role as primarily been a positive force for good, the bulwark for “liberal democracy,” in a hostile world.

The fleeting reference to unnamed “rising powers” is interesting. The potential rivalries of an ascendant capitalist China and its Asian allies, or the Euro Bloc, Russia and India were not explicitly listed, but the elite CFR audience understands the meaning. Nowhere in the paper was there a hint of the economic underpinnings at the root of the U.S. imperial crisis – among them, increasing global competition, the demise of the dollar, monumental trade deficits, the quest to control vital resources, etc.

On Iraq: “Responsible End”

Regarding specifics, the CFR address stated that as a necessary first step “to renew American leadership in the world,” the United States must bring the Iraq war to a “responsible end” in order to “refocus attention on the broader Middle East.” The central point: pacify the situation in Iraq in order to get on with the larger imperial project of winning and maintaining strategic control over the region and its oil reserves.

While failing to mention the invasion and occupation of Iraq as the major source of violence in the country, and focusing on the Sunni-Shiite civil war that seemed so paramount at the time (July, 2007), Obama’s CFR address argued that Iraq’s Shiites and Sunnis would most likely settle their differences without a U.S. presence -- true enough, and an obvious argument for withdrawal.

Astoundingly, Obama then went on to suggest that the contending sides could be pressured toward an agreement by the threat of an imminent American withdrawal (as if the overwhelming majority of Iraqis do not want the U.S. occupation to end!) He then spoke of a “phased withdrawal” of all combat brigades as “the only effective way to apply [such] pressure.” (He initially proposed March, 2008 as the commencement date.) In keeping with decades-long U.S. Middle East strategic interest, Obama’s piece voiced opposition to a complete withdrawal from the region: While vowing to “make [it] clear that we seek no permanent bases in Iraq,” Obama stated that, “…we (sic) should leave behind only a minimal over-the-horizon military force in the region to protect American personnel and facilities, continue training Iraqi security forces, and root out al-Qaeda.”

At the time, he did not state where such an “over-the-horizon” force might possibly be stationed, perhaps since a place in the region where a sizable U.S. force might be welcomed could hardly be said to exist.

Obama’s more recent July, 2008 statements seemed to address that tough question by calling for a “phased redeployment of combat troop,” but maintaining a “residual force” of upwards of 30,000 troops, left behind to pursue an ever elusive “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” while continuing the training of the Iraqi military, and “to protect American service members” (a troop presence in order to protect the troop presence!). This sounds suspiciously like an updated version of the formula whereby Britain maintained semi-colonial control of Iraq from the 1920s all the way up to 1958.

Contingent on Iraqi “political progress,” the judgment of military commanders on the ground, and the possible “need to make tactical adjustments,” Obama now states that U.S. combat brigades currently in Iraq could safely redeploy within 16 months of his taking office. That would make it the summer of 2010. That’s hardly a firm commitment. And without said “political progress,” President Obama would have “no choice” but to carry on the war indefinitely.

Afghanistan: “Boots on the Ground”

Obama would move at least two combat brigades, some 10,000 soldiers, to Afghanistan. In his ’07 CFR address, Obama talked of increasing the number of “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan in order to “confront… terrorists where their roots run deepest.” Like any other tough-talking politician, he didn’t mention how many of those “boots” will wind up “in the ground” along with the soldiers wearing them, or the enormous casualties to be suffered by Afghan civilians.

Pledging to pursue the “real war,” the one against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, in August, 2007 Obama openly spoke of military strikes against “high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan’s Waziristan province. “If we have actionable intelligence and President Musharraf won't act, we will," he proclaimed then. Perhaps Obama’s “inexperience” was showing, as this kind of outrageous violation of an allied nation’s sovereignty isn’t supposed to be explicitly acknowledged, let alone advertised in advance.

In July of this year, he called for “more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, [and] more Predator drones in the Afghan border region.” Convinced that “success in Afghanistan is still possible,” Obama would “pursue an integrated strategy” that would not only increase U.S. troop strength in the country, but would “work to remove the limitations placed by some NATO allies on their forces.”

“To defeat al-Qaeda,” the candidate promised, “I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar.” Neither Hillary Clinton, John McCain or George W. Bush himself could make a more explicit statement of unrestrained imperialist ambition.

How is all this supposed to be accomplished by a military virtually broken by the Iraq debacle? In his July, ’07 CFR speech and again a year later in Washington, Obama called for an increase in the strength of the Army by 65,000 and the Marines by 27,000. “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,” he declared. The speech this July also called for a massive spending project, numbering in the billions, to build and stabilize the Afghan economy.

On Iran: “Force Beyond Self-Defense”

Obama promises no departure from the longer trajectory of U.S. policy toward Iran. The bottom line? Iran must concede to Washington’s demands on all fronts, halt its nuclear program, alleged “sponsorship of terrorism” and “regional aggression,” or pay the price through increased sanctions and, if need be, direct intervention.

While liberal pundits have noted and right-wingers denounced his declared willingness to “sit down and talk” with the leadership in Teheran, Damascus and elsewhere, few have noted that such negotiations would be based on sets of preconditions and the constant threat of “real politic” penalties, the use of coercion and threat of force.

Obama has called for stronger international sanctions against Iran to persuade it to halt uranium enrichment. He co-sponsored the Durbin-Smith Senate Bill, the Iran Counter Proliferation Act, which calls for sanctions on Iran and other countries for assisting Iran in developing a nuclear program. He authored and introduced as the primary sponsor, the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act in May, 2007. That bill would make it easier for state and local governments to divest their pension funds from companies that invest in Iran's energy sector.

Divestment and sanctions for Iran, yes. Divestment and sanctions aimed at Israel’s nuclear weapons? Out of the question.

Interventionism will remain a key component of the Obama’s international “peace through strength” approach. As he put it, “We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense (emphasis mine –AR) 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.”

Would it be too much to suggest that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was just such a “mass atrocity”? Or indeed that “military force in circumstances beyond self-defense,” essentially a restatement of the Bush preemptive war doctrine, is itself a violation of international law and an indictable war crime?

On Israel: “Unshakable Commitment”

Those hoping for a “sea change” in Middle East policy might look no further than Palestine and Israel.

Obama told us in 2007 that, “For more than three decades, Israelis, Palestinians, Arab leaders, and the rest of the world have looked to America to lead the effort to build the road to a lasting peace… Our starting point must always be a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel, our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy.” In the Senate, he has unflinchingly supported increased economic and military aid to Israel and came out strongly in favor of Israel’s July, 2006 attack on Lebanon.

In speeches before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and elsewhere, he has consistently confirmed the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship” and the “unwavering support” of Israel as a cornerstone of US Middle East policy. Feeling compelled to counter claims by critics and opponents, he has consistently voiced the belief that Israel's security is "sacrosanct" and affirmed "an unshakable commitment to the security of Israel and the friendship between the United States and Israel."

In order “to secure a lasting settlement of the conflict with two states living side by side in peace and security,” Obama told the CFR elites, “we must help the Israelis identify and strengthen those partners who are truly committed to peace, while isolating those who seek conflict and instability.”

Barack Obama, unlike the current occupant of the White House, is not uneducated or illiterate. As the Chicago area Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah has recounted from his personal contact, Obama knows perfectly well that the Israeli Occupation is the real source of “conflict and instability.” His speech to AIPAC was more than a statement of obedience to the Zionist lobby – it was part and parcel of Obama’s loyalty oath to the empire and the fundamental continuity of Middle East policy.

Speaking at a synagogue in southern Florida as recently as May of this year, he provided assurances of traditional positions on relations with Israel, promised an "unshakable commitment" to its security, praised the bond between the U.S. and Israel and declared he would not negotiate with Hamas and Hezbollah. Speaking before AIPAC immediately after clinching the nomination in early June, he promised that an “undivided Jerusalem” would “remain the capital of Israel.”

Did he not know that this pronouncement goes even beyond official U.S. policy, according to which Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel? What kind of message did talk of an “undivided Jerusalem” send to the Arab and Muslim masses, especially the faithful who look to the Al Aqsa Mosque/Dome of the Rock as the third holiest place in all of Islam? What kind of “change” does it suggest to them? What “promise” does it hold?

Cuba and Latin America

In a May 23rd speech before the Miami-based right-wing Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), Obama promised to maintain the existing trade embargo against the island “as leverage for winning democratic change.” He said he would lift restrictions on family travel and remittances to the island but would offer to start normalizing relations with the country if it released all political prisoners.
A “change” in direction, here? Not really, but rather a reversion to the Clinton administration’s position. The bottom line? The blockade will remain in place as will the U.S. insistence on “regime change” and a ceaseless opposition to Cuba’s self determination in place since the Kennedy era.

Obama has also promised a continuation of U.S. support for “regime change” in Venezuela, nothing more nor less than the reversal of the Bolivarian revolution. While his CANF speech spoke of the lack of democracy in Cuba, it seemed to suggest something else in regard to Caracas:

...We know that freedom across our hemisphere must go beyond elections. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is a democratically elected leader. But we also know that he does not govern democratically. He talks of the people, but his actions just serve his own power.

Obviously much the same might be said of George W. Bush, except for the detail that Bush probably wasn’t ever “democratically elected” at all, but that’s not the Obama agenda. Voicing opposition not only to Hugo Chavez, but to the inroads in self-determination “from Bolivia to Nicaragua,” the July, 2007 CFR speech also raised another primary concern:

While the United States fails to address the changing realities in the Americas, others from Europe and Asia -- notably China -- have stepped up their own engagement. Iran has drawn closer to Venezuela, and just the other day
Tehran and Caracas launched a joint bank with their windfall oil profits.

Foreign powers meddling in the Western hemisphere? Horrors! (Would anyone be surprised if the would-be President were to invoke the Monroe Doctrine?)
In closing his address to the CFR, Obama waxed rhetorically eloquent, per usual, in a call for a “renewed American leadership” in the world. Interestingly, he quoted from one of the rarely mentioned passages of John Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address.

“To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required -- not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” (Emphasis added.)

A Way Forward?

In sum, Barack Obama promises to uphold the “national interests” of the U.S. imperial project. His promise of a reversion to Clinton-era policy but no actual change in the Middle East status quo; his talk of diplomacy reinforced always by the threat of military force “beyond self-defense” and unilateral interventionism; his call for “regime change” and counter-revolution in Latin America – none of these bode well, especially for all those still hungry for something more material than the rhetorical promise of “change.”

At the height of the Presidential primary season, Obama certainly captured the imagination and yearnings of a huge swath of the U.S. public. His historic campaign mobilized Black America, and whole strata of youth legitimately concerned about an increasingly uncertain future as well as vast numbers of people of color long hungry for a “sea change” in the direction of the country.

The Obama candidacy, perceived not only as longed-for relief from eight years of Bush crowd rapaciousness, but also as a seeming departure from the corporate neoliberalism of the Democratic Leadership Council, also captivated the hearts and minds of many in those sectors where the Left, broadly defined, has had significant influence – in the labor, environmental and peace movements as well as among those basing their support on racial, ethnic and gender identities.

The thought of a John McCain certainly is frightening. No one on the Left would dispute that. Even among those outside the Democratic fold, the argument for “the lesser of two evils” has already become immense, even more so perhaps than with Kerry and Gore in 2004 and 2000. There are those who have even resurrected a line similar to the one put forward by those in 1964 who argued, “Part of the Way with LBJ.” And there are those still enthralled and excited with the fact of Obama’s “historic campaign” who have not gone beyond the form, that well-honed Kennedyesque poise and "vigor", to examine the man’s political substance.

So what do we on the anti-imperialist Left say to those masses of people, tired and rightfully fearful of the Republican agenda, who have placed their hopes in Obama? Clearly, his foreign policy positions provide important messages for those who choose to engage in positive dialogue with his supporters. His designs for the revitalization and furtherance of the U.S. imperial project must also be placed front and center by advocates of independent political action and supporters of Green Party candidates Cynthia McKinney/Rosa Clemente's campaign.

In either case, those critical of the U.S. role in the world must not be party to any illusion of “hope” or substantive, meaningful “change. While an Obama Presidency would be impelled tactically to shift away from the outright warlordism and banditry of Bush & Co, there will be no strategic departure from the continued quest for U.S. global dominance and the imperatives of empire. On that point, those involved in antiwar, peace and anti-imperialist work must remain absolutely clear if the struggles still needed to be won are to continue if and when an Obama inauguration takes place in January.