CounterPunch
March 12 2010
Relax, the Empire’s in Safe Hands
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Are they really bumblers? The establishment’s opinion columns quiver
with reproofs for maladroit handling of foreign policy by President
Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, those
who cherished foolish illusions that Obama’s election might presage a
shift to the left in foreign policy fret about `worrisome signs’ that
this is not the case.
It’s true that there have been some embarrassing moments. Vice
President Biden, on a supposed mission of peace to Israel, is given
the traditional welcome ` a pledge by Israel to build more
settlements, plus adamant refusal to reverse the accelerating
evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.
Hillary Clinton, touring Latin America, was not greeted with gobs of
spit, like vice president Nixon back in 1958, but she did get a couple
of robust diplomatic slaps from Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso
Armorim, rejecting Mrs. Clinton’s hostile references to Venezuela and
call for tougher action toward Iran. Amid detailed news reports of
butchered activists in Tegucigalpa, Latin Americans and even some
Democratic members of the U.S. Congress listened incredulously to Mrs.
Clinton’s brazen hosannas to the supposedly violence-free election of
Honduras’ new, U.S.-sanctioned President Lobo in a process to which
both the Organization of American States and the European Union
refused to lend the sanction of official observers.
Meanwhile, China signals its displeasure at the U.S. with stentorian
protests about Obama’s friendliness toward the Dalai Lama. The PRC
continues its rumblings about shrinking its vast position in U.S.
Treasury bonds.
The Turks recall their ambassador from Washington in the wake of a
vote in a U.S. congressional committee to recognize the massacre of
the Armenians in 1916 as `genocide.’ Russia signals its grave
displeasure at Mrs. Clinton’s rejection, in a speech at the Ecole
Militaire in Paris, of President Medvedev’s proposal to negotiate a
new security pact for Europe. `We object to any spheres of influence
claimed in Europe in which one country seeks to control another’s
future,’ she said. Shortly before this categorical statement, Poland
announced that the U.S. would deploy Patriot missiles on its
territory, less than 50 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad
on the Baltic Sea.
Is this partial list a reflection of incompetence, or a registration
that, with a minor hiccup or two, U.S. foreign policy under Obama is
moving purposefully forward in its basic enterprise: to restore U.S.
credibility in the world theater as the planet’s premier power after
eight years of poor management?
Consider the situation that this Democratic president inherited. In
January 2009, the world was reeling amid violent economic contraction.
Obituaries for the American Century were a dime a dozen. The U.S.
dollar’s future as the world’s reserve currency was written off with
shouts of derision. Imperial adventuring, as in the 2003 invasion of
Iraq, was routinely denounced as fit only for Kipling buffs. The
progressives who voted Obama in were flushed with triumph and
expectation.
Not much more than a year later, Obama has smoothed off the rough
edges of Bush-era foreign policy, while preserving and, indeed,
widening its goals, those in place through the entire postwar era
since 1945.
Latin America? Enough of talk about a new era, led by Chavez of
Venezuela, Morales of Bolivia, and other progressive leaders. So far
as Uncle Sam is concerned, this is still his backyard. On the campaign
trail in 2008, it was Republican John McCain who was reviled as the
lobbyist for Colombia’s death squad patron, President Uribe. Today,
it’s Obama who presides over an adamantly pro-Uribe policy,
supervising a widening of U.S. military basing facilities in Colombia.
As an early signal of continuity, Honduras’ impertinent president
Zelaya, guilty of populist thoughts, was briskly evicted with U.S
approval and behind-the-scenes stage-management.
If ever there was a nation for whose enduring misery the U.S.A. bears
irrefutable responsibility (along with France), it is Haiti. As noted
by Noam Chomsky on this site last week, the hovels which fell down in
the earthquake were those of people rendered destitute by U.S.
policies since Jefferson, and most notably by the man to whom Obama is
most often compared, another Nobel peace-prize-winning U.S. president,
Woodrow Wilson. The houses that did not fall down in such numbers were
those of the affluent elites, most recently protected by Bill Clinton
who was second only to Wilson in the horrors he sponsored in Haiti.
Yet under Obama, the U.S.A. is hailed as a merciful and generous
provider for the stricken nation, even though it has been Cuba and
Venezuela who have been the stalwarts, with doctors (in the case of
Cuba) and total debt forgiveness (in the case of Venezuela). The
U.S.A. refused such debt relief.
Israel? Not one substantive twitch has discommoded the benign support
of Israel by its patron, even though Obama stepped into power amid
Israel’s methodical war crimes ` later enumerated by Judge Goldstone
for the U.N. ` in Gaza. Consistent U.S. policy has been to advocate a
couple of mini-Bantustans for the Palestinians and, under Obama, the
U.S. has endured no substantive opposition to this plan from its major
allies.
With Iran, there is absolute continuity with the Bush years, sans the
noisy braggadocio of Cheney: assiduous and generally successful
diplomatic efforts to secure international agreement for deepening
sanctions; disinformation campaigns about Iran’s adherence to
international treaties, very much in the Bush style of 2002. In the
interests of overall U.S. strategy in the region, Israel is held on a
leash.
No need to labor the obvious about Afghanistan: an enlarged U.S.
expeditionary force engineered with one laughable pledge ` earnestly
brandished by the progressives ` that the troops will be home in time
for the elections of 2012. The U.S. and, indeed, world anti-war
movements live only in memory. Earlier this week, Congressional
Democrats in the House could barely muster 60 votes against the Afghan
war.
Russia? Vice President Biden excited the foreign policy commentariat
with talk of a `reset’ in posture toward Russia. Outside rhetoric,
here’s no such reset ` merely continuation of U.S. policy since the
post-Soviet collapse. Last October, Biden emphasized that the U.S.
`will not tolerate’ any `spheres of influence,’ nor Russia’s `veto
power’ on the eastward expansion of NATO. The U.S.A. is involved in
retraining the Georgian army.
China may thunder about the Dalai Lama and Taiwan ` but, on the larger
stage, the Middle Kingdom’s world heft is much exaggerated. The astute
China-watcher Peter Lee hits the mark when he wrote recently in Asia
Times that `the U.S. is cannily framing and choosing fights that unite
the U.S., the EU, and significant resource producers, and isolate
China and force it to defend unpopular positions alone. By my reading,
China is pretty much a one-trick pony in international affairs. It
offers economic partnership and cash. What it doesn’t have is what the
U.S. has: military reach ¦ heft in the global financial markets
(Beijing’s immense overexposure to U.S. government securities is, I
think, becoming less of an advantage and more of a liability), or a
large slate of loyal and effective allies in international
organization.’
The United States, as Lee points out, is also making `good progress in
pursuing the most destabilizing initiative of the next 20 years:
encouragement of India’s rise from Afghanistan through to Myanmar as a
rival and distraction to China.’
All of this is scarcely a catalogue of bumbledom. Obama is just what
the Empire needed. Plagued though it may be by deep structural
problems, he has improved its malign potential for harm ` the first
duty of all U.S. presidents of whatever imagined political stripe.
Oscars in the Age of Obama
If you want a signifier of the changed image of empire, and imperial
adventures in foreign lands, think about last Sunday’s six Oscars for
The Hurt Locker, including ones for Best Movie and Best Director. The
film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, said at the end of her acceptance
speech, `I’d like to dedicate this to the women and men in the
military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan
and around the world and may they come home safe.’
Suppose Bigelow’s former husband, James Cameron, had won Best Director
for Avatar. There is surely no way Cameron would ever have dedicated
his Oscar to any soldiers, American or Canadian, serving as members of
the imperial coalition ` volunteers all ` in Iraq or Afghanistan,
unless they had defected to the other side or mutinied and been put in
the brig or were facing a firing squad for treason. There is also
surely no way that any movie about a serving unit in Iraq would have
been in the running for an Oscar back in Bush time.
I hoped Avatar would get a big Oscar rather than the consolations ones
for cinematography and special effects. It would have honored a truly
uncompromising anti-war, anti-American-Empire movie. I haven’t seen
The Hurt Locker and don’t plan to, having endured more than one
bomb-disposal films in my movie-going career. Also, the circumstances
of the movie’s filming seemed distasteful, with scenes shot in a
Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. `We had these Blackwater guys that
were working with us in the Middle East and they taught us like
tactical maneuvers and stuff ` how to just basically position yourself
and move with a gun,’ Hurt Locker actor Anthony Mackie told the New
York Times’ Melena Ryzik. `We were shooting in Palestinian refugee
camps. We were shooting in some pretty hard places. It wasn’t like we
were without enemies. There were people there looking at us, ‘cuz we
were three guys in American military suits runnin’ around with guns.
It was nothing easy about it. It was always a compromising situation.’
Jeremy Scahill writes an item in The Nation about Blackwater’s role,
as disclosed by Ryzik and the author of The Hurt Locker’s screenplay,
Mark Boal, made haste to contact him to deny that Blackwater had ever
been hired in any capacity. Boal, apparently, supervised all such
hiring of military and security consultants. Scahill asked him about
comments made by the film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, in other
interviews, mentioning the presence of Blackwater personnel on set,
including as technical advisers. `It’s possible,’ Boal conceded,
`that at some point somebody on set worked for Blackwater, but we
never hired Blackwater.’
The New York Times writer Melena Ryzik describes how Mackie showed her
how the Blackwater men trained him to hold his weapon. `If you’re a
trained killer,’ Mackie told Ryzik, `you’re very precise.’ This is
Blackwater-precision, as displayed by the panic-stricken contractors,
when they mowed down 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in
Baghdad in 2007. But then, as Obama quoted in his Nobel Peace Prize
acceptance speech from his favorite intellectual and unappetizing
apologist for Empire, Reinhold Niebuhr, `To say that force may
sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism ` it is a recognition
of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.’
The Fight Against Corporate Power
In his important special report in our latest newsletter, Mason
Gaffney addresses the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious January 21, 2010,
ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, that a
corporation may contribute unlimited funds advertising its views for
and against political candidates of its choice ` in practice, the
choice of its CEO or directors. `The United States was born in
rebellion against corporations,’ Gaffney writes. `The U.S. Supreme
Court soon began restoring their power. When it overreached, strong
executives and popular movements set it back: under Andrew Jackson,
Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR. Today it has overreached
again; it remains to see if a new movement or leader will arise to set
it back again.’
Gaffney assays the best political strategies for popular
counter-attack. As he concludes, `Will `ordinary’ taxpayers rebel, as
they did in the American Revolution, Emancipation, the Progressive Age
of Reform, and the New Deal, or will corporate power wax unchecked
until it replaces democracy altogether? Cyclical theory says we will
have another anti-corporate reaction, but history also records tipping
points in the decline of nations, from which they do not recover for
generations, if ever. This one may be a squeaker.’
Back to FDR, I say. Pack the Supreme Court!
In the same bumper newsletter JoAnn Wypijewski has a truly terrific
piece about the `cargo chain’ as described by at a recent conference
of radical dockworkers from around the world, meeting in Charleston,
S.C.: `The people who move the world can also stop it,’ radical
dockworkers like to say, and that captures the essential fragility of
a global production and distribution system that depends on the
precise coordination of hundreds of thousands of moving parts. If some
of those moving parts’workers at a major trucking hub, a major rail
switching network or, especially, a strategic string of ports’refuse
to do their part, the whole system gets jammed up. Refuse long enough
and broadly enough, and the system would be in crisis. `
Read her powerful reporting from the front lines of the world class struggle.
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