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Sunday, September 28, 2014

American Leadership or Hegemonic Global Empire Continued





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Obama's great dilemma: to be or not to be the world's policeman


The president's willingness to lead the fight against Isis doesn't tally with his talk of curbing America's role on the world stage

Obama, Michael Cohen
'American leadership is the one constant in an uncertain world': Barack Obama addresses America last week. Photograph: Rex
Iraq… America just can't quit you. For 23 years and across four presidencies, American planes have been waging war either against or on behalf of Iraqis. And if President Obama's prediction of a long-term struggle against Isis is correct, it might soon be five presidents and a quarter of a century.
How does that keep happening? How did a candidate who won the nation's highest office on a platform of ending the war in Iraq find himself six years later announcing yet another military engagement in Iraq? How has a president who has seemingly made it his priority to pivot to Asia, rely less on the military and put forward a more restrained foreign policy been thwarted once again?
A good part of the reason is that while Americans might talk about imposing limits on American power and defining our global interests more narrowly, we rarely follow through – and here Obama, who has sought to step back from using American power to solve every international problem, must shoulder some of the blame.
The fact is, the same president who has tried to offer something of a more modest and realistic vision for American foreign policy can't seem to keep himself out of the swampy environs of American exceptionalism. Don't take my word for it – look at his speech on Wednesday announcing America's strategy for "degrading and defeating" Isis.
On the one hand, Obama played down the threat from Isis by noting "we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland" (even though he warned that Isis could attack in the future). His strategy was eminently reasonable and relatively restrained. America would be one of many acting in Iraq; would rely on air power and no boots on the ground; would work with regional allies and utilise a few tools in the national security toolbox other than aerial bombardment.
This looks a lot different from the wars in Iraq or the ill-fated 2009 surge in Afghanistan. It's outsourced counter-terrorism, reliance on proxy militaries in Syria and Iraq and American air power. So far so good, right?
It's the rest of Obama's speech that is more problematic, because to sell his strategy for destroying Isis he laid it on pretty thick. According to Obama, the reason for America to act in Iraq is not just because Isis might one day be a threat or because it challenges key US interests in the region or because the group is a deeply nihilistic and malignant force that merits a militarised response to its hateful actions, but rather, well, because we're America.
"American leadership is the one constant in an uncertain world," said Obama. "It is America that has the capacity and the will to mobilise the world against terrorists."
It is America that "rallied the world against Russian aggression"; "that can help contain and cure the outbreak of Ebola"; "that helped remove and destroy Syria's declared chemical weapons" and "is helping Muslim communities, not just in the fight against terrorism, but in the fight for opportunity and tolerance and a more hopeful future". That's a lot of responsibilities.
And in case you thought those recent public opinion polls that showed the American people were a bit tired of playing the role of global cop, think again. "As Americans, we welcome our responsibility to lead," said the president. "Our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden."
Moreover, America's "own safety" and its "own security" depends on its "willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation and uphold the values that we stand for". Except if upholding those values is really difficult, like in Syria over the past three years.
Pointing out this rhetorical inconsistency isn't necessarily a policy criticism. Obama's strategy for dealing with Isis and his approach to the bloody civil war in Syria have demonstrated modesty and restraint. These are underrated and underappreciated attributes; as, too, are Obama's deliberation and caution, which you'd want any American president who commands the world's largest military, several times over, to exhibit.
But if you really want the US to play a less active role in global affairs or even "lead from behind", making the claim that only America has the capacity and will to mobilise the world … well, guess who is going to get asked to organise a posse when there's trouble? By describing America as the indispensable nation, Obama and his Oval Office predecessors have created a self-fulfilling outcome in which it's basically impossible for the US to share the responsibilities of maintaining global peace and security with anyone else. Of course, doing so also leaves the rest of the world, and in particular our close allies, off the hook. Why should they take the lead when they know the United States always will?
Perhaps there is no way around this dilemma. Every group needs a leader and why not America? After all, we certainly do benefit from a world that is more stable and peaceful; that is more democratic and prosperous and that abides by global rules and norms. In a very real sense that's the postwar world we were trying to create at the end of the second world war and, nearly 70 years later, one can say that we've largely succeeded. But in an era when the threats to America are few and far between and when, current events notwithstanding, the world is unusually safe, this would be the perfect moment for America to fob off some of its global responsibilities to others and, as Obama has often said in the past, conduct some nation-building at home.
But the practically unquestioned notion of US global responsibility and leadership makes that nearly impossible. The contradictions in Obama's approach are ones that are evident among the American people who on the one hand want the US to remain the most powerful country in the world but also want other countries to share more of our international burdens.
So perhaps Obama has little choice but to appeal to American's sense of national pride when asking them to support yet another military engagement in a nation where so much American blood has already been spilled. And that's perhaps why a less ideologically tinged, more interest-based argument won't do. After all, dropping bombs seems a bit more legitimate when it's done on behalf of values rather than interests. But to be clear, all this chest puffing comes with a price.
In 2008, when Obama was running for president he said his goal wasn't simply to end the Iraq war but to end the mind-set that got America involved in that terrible conflict in the first place. Six years later, there's a lot more work to do and it begins with Obama's bully pulpit.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

The God of War is on the Verge of Another Victory






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The God of War is on the Verge of Another Victory


Addressing the complexity of others’ brutal behavior means facing our terrifying complicity in it


"What Obama doesn’t bother to say, though perhaps in some helpless, futile way he knows, is that engaging in the game of war is always an act of defeat." (Photo: Johan Viirok)


Barack Obama’s central dilemma last week, when he tried to sell a new war to the American public on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, was to speak convincingly about the wisdom and effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy over the last decade-plus while at the same time, alas, dropping the bad news that it didn’t work.

Thus: “Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.”

Hurray! God bless drones and “mission accomplished” and a million Iraqi dead and birth defects in Fallujah. God bless torture. God bless the CIA. But guess what?

“Still we continue to face a terrorist threat. We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm.”

So it’s bombs away again, boys—another trace of evil has popped up in the Middle East—and I find myself at the edge of outrage, the edge of despair, groping for language to counter my own incredulity that the God of War is on the verge of another victory and Planet Earth and human evolution lose again.

Obama ended his executive declaration of more war with words that the military-industrial shills have slowly managed to turn into an obscenity: “May God bless our troops, and may God bless the United States of America.”

God bless another war?

Tom Engelhardt, writing a few days ago at TomDispatch, called it “Iraq 3.0,” noting: “Nowhere, at home or abroad, does the obvious might of the United States translate into expected results, or much of anything else except a kind of roiling chaos. . . . And one thing is remarkably clear: each and every application of American military power globally since 9/11 has furthered the fragmentation process, destabilizing whole regions.

“In the twenty-first century, the U.S. military has been neither a nation- nor an army-builder, nor has it found victory, no matter how hard it’s searched. It has instead been the equivalent of the whirlwind in international affairs, and so, however the most recent Iraq war works out, one thing seems predictable: the region will be
further destabilized and in worse shape when it’s over.”

Obama’s speech is addressed to a nation with a dead imagination. Doing “something” about the Islamic State means dropping bombs on it. Bombing runs don’t inconvenience a politician’s constituents and always seem like stalwart action: a squirt of Raid on an infestation of bugs. They never kill innocent people or result in unintended consequences; nor, apparently, do they provoke an instant sense of horror, the way a beheading does.

Indeed, declarations of war always seem to lift people up. This is because they separate us from the evil that our enemies are committing. Addressing the complexity of others’ brutal behavior means facing our terrifying complicity in it—which is asking far too much of any Beltway-entrenched U.S. politician. Obama hasn’t broken in any way from his inarticulate predecessor in attempting to exploit the simplistic emotional safe haven of war and militarism.

“How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America?” George Bush asked during a press conference a month after the 9/11 attacks (quoted recently by William Blum in his latest Anti-Empire Report). “I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am—like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”

Obama is trying to extract the same public acquiescence to military aggression from the IS beheadings of two U.S. journalists and a British aid worker as Bush did from 9/11. Bush had the distinct advantage of not having himself—and the disastrous mess he created—as his predecessor. Nevertheless, Iraq 3.0 is going to become a reality, even though bombing Iraq will just strengthen IS and likely open the door to the next multi-year military quagmire.

As David Swanson laments on the website World Beyond War, speaking of the first journalist IS brutally murdered, “James Foley is not a war ad.”

“When 9/11 victims were used as a justification to kill hundreds of times the number of people killed on 9/11, some of the victims’ relatives pushed back,” Swanson writes. Linking to a video in which Foley talks about the hell and absurdity of war with filmmaker Haskell Wexler during the NATO protests in Chicago two years ago, he adds: “Now James Foley is pushing back from the grave.”

He invites us to watch Foley talk about “the dehumanization needed before people can be killed, the shallowness of media coverage” and other toxic realities of war that usually don’t show up in presidential speeches.

“We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world . . .”

I can’t believe I live in a country that still tolerates such simplistic, knife-edged rhetoric. Oh, so much evil out there! The U.S. government, in all its might and purity, has no choice but to go after it with every weapon in its arsenal. What Obama doesn’t bother to say, though perhaps in some helpless, futile way he knows, is that engaging in the game of war is always an act of defeat. And the opponents, in their brutal aggression toward each other and everyone else, are always on the same side.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

America Caused the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL or IS)




America Caused the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL or IS)

America Caused the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL or IS)
Image Credits: ISIS via Twitter

by Michael S. Rozeff | LewRockwell.com | August 27, 2014