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 By what standard shall we judge Barack Obama?
Many of my readers have been upset with me for my criticisms of President Obama's policies. Following my last two reports, more than a dozen have asked to be removed from my mailing list. But if you share my view that the numerous atrocities US foreign policy is responsible for constitute the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity and happiness, then I think you have to want leaders who are unambiguously opposed to America's military adventures, because those interventions are unambiguously harmful. There's nothing good to be said about dropping powerful bombs on crowds of innocent people, invading their land, overthrowing their government, occupying the country, breaking down the doors of the citizens, killing the father, raping the mother, traumatizing the children, torturing those opposed to all this ... Barack Obama has no problem with this, if we judge him by his policies and not his rhetoric. And neither does Al Franken, who's about to become a Democratic Senator from Minnesota. The former Saturday Night Live comedian would like you to believe that he’s been against the war in Iraq since it began, but he's gone to Iraq four times to entertain the troops. Does that make sense? Why does the military bring entertainers to soldiers? To lift the soldiers' spirits. Why does the military want to lift the soldiers’ spirits? A happier soldier does his job better. And what’s the soldier’s job? All the charming things listed above. Doesn't Franken know what these guys do? He criticized the Bush administration because they “failed to send enough troops to do the job right.”10 What “job” did the man think the troops were sent to do that had not been performed to his standards because of lack of manpower? Did he want them to be more efficient at killing Iraqis who resisted the occupation? Franken has been lifting soldiers' spirits for a long time. This past March he was honored by the United Service Organization (USO) for his ten years of entertaining troops abroad. That includes Kosovo in 1999, as imperialist an occupation as you'll want to see. He called his USO experience "one of the best things I've ever done."11 Franken has also spoken at West Point, encouraging the next generation of imperialist warriors. Is this a man to challenge the militarization of America at home and abroad? No more so than Obama. Tom Hayden wrote this about Franken in 2005 when Franken had a regular program on the Air America radio network: Is anyone else disappointed with Al Franken's daily defense of the continued war in Iraq? Not Bush's version of the war, because that would undermine Air America's laudable purpose of rallying an anti-Bush audience. But, well, Kerry's version of the war, one that can be better managed and won, somehow with better body armor and fewer torture cells. This morning Franken was endorsing Sen. Joe Biden's proposal to send 5,000 NATO troops to close the Syrian-Iraq border, bring in foreign trainers for the Iraqi officer corps, and put Iraqis to work cleaning up the destruction of our invasion. ... Now that Bush has manipulated us into the invasion, Franken thinks we have no choice but to ... stay until we crush the insurgents. It's a humanitarian excuse for open-ended American occupation. And it's shared widely by the professional political and pundit class who think of themselves as the conscience of the American establishment and the leadership of the Democratic Party.12 Long live the Cold War President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a military coup June 28 because he was about to conduct a non-binding survey of the population, asking the question: "Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?" One of the issues that Zelaya hoped a new constitution would deal with is the limiting of the presidency to one four-year term. He also expressed the need for other constitutional changes to make it possible for him to carry out policies to improve the life of the poor; in countries like Honduras, the law is not generally crafted for that end. At this writing it's not clear how matters will turn out in Honduras, but the following should be noted: the United States, by its own admission, was fully aware for weeks of the Honduran military's plan to overthrow Zelaya. Washington says it tried its best to change the mind of the plotters. It's difficult to believe that this proved impossible. During the Cold War it was said, with much justification, that the United States could discourage a coup in Latin America with "a frown". The Honduran and American military establishments have long been on very fraternal terms. And it must be asked: In what way and to what extent did the United States warn Zelaya of the impending coup? And what protection did it offer him? The response to the coup from the Obama administration can be described with adjectives such as lukewarm, proper but belated, and mixed. It is not unthinkable that the United States gave the military plotters the go-ahead, telling them to keep the traditional "golpe" bloodiness to a minimum. Zelaya was elected to office as the candidate of a conservative party; he then, surprisingly, moved to the left and became a strong critic of a number of Washington policies, and an ally of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom the Bush administration tried to overthrow and assassinate. Following the coup, National Public Radio (NPR) showed once again why progressives refer to it as National Pentagon Radio. The station's leading news anchor, Robert Siegel, interviewed Johanna Mendelson Forman, of the conservative think tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies: Siegel: "There hasn't been a coup in Latin America for quite a while." Forman: "I think the last one was in 1983" Siegel did not correct her.14 This is ignorance of considerable degree. There was a coup in Venezuela in 2002 that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, a coup in Haiti in 2004 that permanently overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and a coup in Panama in 1989 that permanently overthrew Manuel Noriega. Is it because the US was closely involved in all three coups that they have been thrown down the Orwellian Memory Hole? William Blum is the author of: •Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
•Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
•West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
•Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org 1.William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 9 ↩
2.Associated Press, June 16, 2009 ↩
3.New York Times, June 21, 2009 ↩
4.See Seymour Hersh, New Yorker magazine, June 29, 2008; ABC News, May 22, 2007; and Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch, June 19-21, 2009 for descriptions of some of these and other anti-Iran covert activities. ↩
5.White House press conference, June 23, 2009 ↩
6.The only mention is by Jeff Stein in "CQ Politics" [Congressional Quarterly], online, June 22, 2009, "according to former CIA and military officials". ↩
7.Center for International Policy (Washington, DC) report, June 16, 2009 ↩
8.Time magazine, June 29, 2009, p.26 ↩
9.AlterNet.org, June 14, 2009; Wilayto is the author of "In Defense of Iran: Notes from a U.S. Peace Delegation's Journey through the Islamic Republic" ↩
10.Washington Post, February 16, 2004 ↩
11.Star Tribune (Minneapolis), March 26, 2009 ↩
12.Huffington Post, sometime in June 2005, but it may no longer be there. ↩
13.Washington Post, June 30, 2009 ↩
14.NPR, All Things Considered, June 29, 2009 ↩
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