Yet no matter how much Obama grovels, it’s never enough for the guys at AIPAC. What AIPAC wants from Obama, basically, is what they want from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—total surrender: “I admit it. I’m a fairie. All Democrats are fairies. What we need for this job is a goddamn Republican. Kick me out in November.”
Ever since the failure of the Carter Administration, liberals—the ones who have won elections—have believed that the Republicans own both defense and foreign policy. The Obama Administration has been pushed disastrously to the right. As both Attorney General Eric Holder’s abysmal speech “justifying” presidential murder (only when it’s necessary, of course) and Obama’s promise that he will do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon testify, the Obama Administration is convinced that the American people demand pre-emptive action in foreign affairs—“Let’s do it to them before they do it to us!”
And so this nation is covering itself in blood, stumbling out of a useless, purposeless, counter-productive war in Afghanistan but disguising its retreat with a useless, purposeless, counter-productive policy of assassination throughout the Middle East, to show that we mean business. I mean, if we’re killing people, that shows we’re tough, right?
While this minor, but unrelenting blood-letting continues, we follow exactly the same path with Iran that we followed with Iraq—endless harassment ostensibly intended to provoke submission but actually seeking defiance, which of course will “justify” more harassment, leading to more defiance, and ultimately war with a nation twice as large as Iraq and ten times as united, against a national leadership that, unlike Saddam Hussein, has never invaded another country.
President Obama, and our national leadership generally, will never abandon this policy absent constant political pressure. And yet there is almost zero pressure on the Administration from the left. The endless “what went wrong” books, articles, and blog about the Obama Administration’s first two years focus almost entirely on the economy. Liberals, it seems, don’t do foreign policy. This is a horrible mistake.
Liberals traditionally seek sweeping moral causes as inspiration for political involvement. The ultimate rejection of the Vietnam Peace movement by the American electorate, symbolized by the three straight presidential victories of the Reagan-Bush Administration, has convinced liberals that Peace is a losing strategy. They’d rather save the environment.
But the cause of environmentalism is a fraudulent one. There is no good reason to believe that global warming is at all likely to lead to the environmental disasters so confidently predicted by environmentalists, whether they have Nobel Prizes or no. Beyond that, this is exactly zero chance that the nations of the world will agree to the massive economic transformations that environmentalists would so blithely inflict on the rest of us, and there is no reason why they should. If environmental disaster comes, we will deal with it. We should not, and cannot, transform the way billions of people live to satisfy the computer models of environmental busy-bodies who simply want to tell the rest of us how to live.
Liberals should turn their attention instead to the clear and present danger of American “exceptionalism”—the determination of the right wing to invent a new Cold War, directed against Iran, Russia, and, above all, China, nations that, while they frequently behave cruelly (as do we), present no threat to the United States.
Neo-cons love to cite George Orwell, but they neglect one of his most shrewd conceits, depicting, in his bleak vision of the future, a world divided into several empires that are constantly at war with one another, supposedly a war to the death. But in fact it’s all a sham. The wars are fought for internal purposes, not external ones. The empires’ rulers demand limitless sacrifice from their citizens, not to defend them from limitless danger, but to secure limitless power for themselves.
The Obama Administration has shown itself to be absolutely defenseless against the combined pressure of AIPAC, congressional Republicans, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Indeed, the President himself seems to take pleasure in secrecy and arbitrary power for their own sake. It looks like a long and winding road.
Update
For a more informed, and more nuanced, take on the bad (and good) of the President’s AIPAC address, see Phyllis Bennis in Salon.
