Home  
  About  
  Americas  
  Global  
  Iraq  
  Palestine  
  Zionism  
  Stooges  
  Blog  
  Video  
  Links  
  • Brutal bullies
  • Spellbinders
  • Delusional fabrication
  • Invisible men
  • Perfidy, duplicity and deceit
  • Stupid? Or democratically ignorant?
  • Fellow Americans
  • Letter to a rustic American
  • 9/11
  • No one here gets out alive
  • Everything old is new again
  • Bring me the head of Silvino Herrera
  • God, Bush and the bomb
  • Who's the dog? Who's the tail?
  • Beware of the dog!
  • King George
  • The night after
  • Bush squares off with Bolivia and Venezuela over hemispheric model
  • Bolivia's radical realignment under Evo Morales
  • Bolivia's Evo Morales
  • Blowback and globalization
  • Iraq and the American peasant
  • Saint Patrick's Day and missed opportunity
  • Ecuador’s left triumphs at home and prepares to challenge US dominance in South America
  • Of the people
  • Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum
  • The apathetic American
  • Lying about Liberty
  • Landless rural workers confront Brazil’s Lula
  • Round and round we go
  • The new holocaust
  • Voices from the wilderness
  • Miss C.
  • The great deceivers
  • Nuclear hypocrisy in the Middle East
  • Reflections on reality and ideals
  • From sea to shining sea
  • Two knights and a dragon
  • Charges dropped against last of “Los Angeles Eight”
  • The dubious decider
  • No change for me: I want bills
  • US double standard on divestment
  • Don't count on it
  • Sing ‘til the power of the Lord comes down
  • All the baggage, none of the charm
  • Crash and burn
  • A modern tragic hero
  • Politics as usual?
  • Who cares?
  • The real losers
  • Bombs away
  • Evil revisited
  • Obama as icon
  • Obama's missteps
  • Demented morality
  • The rise of food fascism
  • See no evil
  • Obama sweeps “inconvenient” UN resolutions under the carpet
  • A liar’s tale
  • Confronting the right wing rebellion in Bolivia
  • A reason to stay
  • Bail out, Congressman
  • The Night of Tlatelolco
  • The roots of violence
  • Mindsets
  • Campaign rubbish
  • Congratulations Barak Obama, congratulations Americans
  • Barack Obama appoints Israeli as his chief of staff
  • What are we to think of President Barack Obama?
  • Obama’s Trojan Horse
  • Open letter to Mr Barack Obama, US President-elect
  • Rahm Emanuel’s Israeli gate
  • The pacifier’s conflict
  • “The chickens come home to roost”
  • What’s wrong with America?
  • Barack Obama’s chants and choices of change
  • "We control America"
  • Our Bleak House
  • Et Tu, Daniel? The Sandinista Revolution betrayed
  • Obama’s Achilles Heel
  • When the shoe pinches
  • The US has “no moral standing” to criticize Iran
  • This is un-cool, Obama. Best stay home
  • A pressing problem: paranoia and power
  • Aggressive behaviour by any other name
  • What good is America?
  • Obama means no change
  • Was Nuremberg a temporary convenience?
  • Israel’s American visitor to the Gulf
  • Terrorism breeds terrorism
  • Rethinking the costs of peace
  • Mr Abbas goes to Washington
  • Obama’s speech in Cairo: afterthoughts
  • The Uighurs, Guantanamo, Cuba and Palestine
  • “Armchair” killing: a US-Israeli trade-mark
  • America’s arrogant manipulator
  • Honduran coup tries to halt advance of Latin American left
  • Blustering Biden bows to Bibi
  • The world's wicked war of words
  • The case for revisiting Nuremburg
  • The “democracy” that can do no wrong
  • The drama and the farce
  • The recession is over! (Now get off your lazy asses and spend some money, dammit!)
  • Obama should back Goldstone report
  • The Nobel Prize, the Brand and the President
  • No change in USA’s “Mafia principle” – Noam Chomsky
  • America’s deadly game of trick or treat
  • The Zionist con game in America
  • The resistance of the oppressed
  • The Islamophobe quartet of the USA
  • Double trouble haunts the media
  • Pearl Harbour as Japanese blowback
  • Stoking the fires of fear and hatred
  • Should Khalid Shaikh Mohammed go free?
  • Corruption by harlots in elected office
  • The Quiet American
  • Vengeance – the terrorist’s flag
  • Why Martha Coakley lost
  • Stop terrorizing the world
  • My country 'tis of thee – corporatocracy! Of thee I sing
  • What remains must be the truth: 9/11 revisited
  • What locals in USA know – and what the big guys could learn (but won't)
  • Haiti still suffers after the media big boys wrap
  • The standards that double with warriors
     
    The pacifier’s conflict

    Will Barack Obama bring about real change in US foreign policy?

    By Paul J. Balles

    6 December 2008 

    Paul J. Balles contrasts Barack Obama’s original stance against the Iraq war with his recent appointment of hawks for vice-president, secretary of state and secretary of defence, and wonders which persona Obama will assume upon becoming president.

    Either President-elect Barack Obama is going to be found guilty of a clever bait and switch manoeuvre or many people around him are going to have to eat crow.

    Here's the bait: starting in an October 2002 rally in Chicago's Federal Plaza, Obama declared his opposition to what he called a "dumb war”. In the US Senate, he voted against it. Throughout his campaign, he reminded his audiences that he opposed the war in Iraq.

    Next, the possible switch: If Obama fails to bring the troops home, he will engender something close to a riot among the progressives and the left-of-centre Democrats opposed to the war.

    If, as the new "decider-in-chief", he turns "bait" into action, Obama will have most of his chosen appointees humbled, eating their own words and reversing their earlier positions.

    As Jonathan Martin has noted:

    Vice-President-elect Joe Biden initially backed the war in Iraq and has supported other military interventions in his long Senate career. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton also supported the Iraq war resolution, a vote that Obama framed as a critical failure of judgement during the primary. She's also taken a harder line on Iran than the president-elect-and is in line to be his secretary of state.

    Martin, political writer for Politico and the National Review, added:

    Jim Jones, a retired Marine general who advised Clinton, Obama and John McCain during the campaign and has refused to disclose his partisan leanings, is slated for National Security Adviser. And running the Pentagon? For at least the first year of his administration, it's virtually certain that the new president will retain Robert Gates – the secretary of defence appointed by President Bush.

    Surely, with 133 members of the House of Representatives and 23 senators who voted against the war, Obama could have chosen experienced lawmakers who made the right foreign policy decision in 2002.

    In his speech before Congress opposing the Iraq war Obama said:

    I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

    Fully aware of the politics involved in the Bush administration's push for war, Obama added:

    What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

    The foresight reflected in that part of Obama's speech in 2002,seems nothing less than prophetic of what he would focus on in 2007 and 2008 to win the election to the US presidency.

    Conflict resolutions aren’t simple; however, and they’re never easy. In some ways, it seems as if Obama is purposely creating conflicts through his attempts to create auras of non-partisan politics. He should look back to the sessions before the vote on the Iraq war resolution passed. Despite his well-reasoned speech in the Senate, he only managed to recruit one Republican senator.

    We can only hope that he will stand firm, maintain the sensibility he had in 2002 as well as in his election campaign and force his experienced appointees to eat their words, admit the errors of their ways and work to repair some of the enormous damage done. 


    Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.



    Copyright © Redress Information & Analysis.
    All rights reserved.