Pilger - Obama's speech to AIPAC is the tip of the iceberg

For some, Barack Obama's recent speech to AIPAC was an unexpected eye-opener. Contrary to the dovish aura he casts in the electoral campaign, his remarks to AIPAC presented the political views of Israel's Likud party, a conservative block closely allied with the U.S.'s neo-cons.

In the following column, journalist and film-maker John Pilger not only describes Obama's backward views on Israel, but demonstrates that these are fully consistent with the rest of his and his advisers' foreign policy positions on Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan.

If you are one of those millions drawn to Obama because you think he is progressive and a sharp contrast to John McCain, please read Pilger's column in careful detail. It makes the best case yet that Obama is as hawkish as the rest of the Democratic Party, holding only minor disagreements with McCain on nearly all foreign policy questions.

After Bobby Kennedy

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/05/obama-pilger-mccain-kennedy

John Pilger, New Statesman, 29 May 2008

Bobby Kennedy's campaign is the model for Barack Obama's current bid to
be the Democratic nominee for the White House. Both offer a false hope
that they can bring peace and racial harmony to all Americans.

In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It
is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected
president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968.
Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the
Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times.
He would "return government to the people" and bestow "dignity and
justice" on the oppressed. "As Bernard Shaw once said," he would say,
"'Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things
that never were and ask: Why not?'" That was the signal to run back to
the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.

Kennedy's campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a
senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the
expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to
end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war's conquest of other
people's land and resources, but because it was "unwinnable".

Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be
liberalism's last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as
a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy
liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the
hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager
for "leadership" and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting
propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate
system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed
through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own
ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of
the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the
streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn
together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had
supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but
this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene
McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war
ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another
term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously
exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for
politics that represented them, not the rich.

"These people love you," I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where
the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a
great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.

"Yes, yes, sure they love me," he replied. "I love them!" I asked him
how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his
political philosophy? "Philosophy? Well, it's based on a faith in this
country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want
to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the
world, as Thomas Jefferson said."

"That's what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?"

"How . . . by charting a new direction for America."

The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may
well "chart a new direction for America" in specious, media-honed
language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best
damned democracy money can buy.

Embarrassing truth

As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how,
regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw
nearer to each other. They already concur on America's divine right to
control all before it. "We lead the world in battling immediate evils and
promoting the ultimate good," said Obama. "We must lead by building a
21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people
[emphasis added]." McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing "terrorists" he
would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn't quarrel.

Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv,
unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In
opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel's
starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and
Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a
statement that "nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people" to
now read: "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the
failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis
added]." Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal
military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has
furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says
absurdly, "is a threat to all of us".

On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost
united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years
(instead of "100 years", his earlier option). Obama has now "reserved the
right" to change his pledge to get troops out next year. "I will listen
to our commanders on the ground," he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser
on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in
Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to
support Bush's demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has
called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers
embrace McCain's proposal for an aggressive "league of democracies", led
by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.

Amusingly, both have denounced their "preachers" for speaking out.
Whereas McCain's man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic
white holy-rollers, Obama's man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing
truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a
consequence of the violence of US power across the orld. The media
demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the
Bush lie that "terrorists attacked America because they hate our
freedoms". So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was
rooted not "primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel", but
in "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam". Journalists
applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.

The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating
calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner,
founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: "There is a sense of
dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a
resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges
America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon 'the
better angels of our nature'." At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane
confessed: "I know it shouldn't be happening, but it is. I'm falling for
John McCain." His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings
for McCain, he wrote, were like "the war that must occur inside a
14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than
to girls".

The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their
support for America's true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite
claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors,
Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG,
Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit
Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. "Seven
of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors," wrote the investigator Pam
Martens, "consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street
firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated
in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages." A report by
United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss
to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between
$164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people
of colour in the United States. "Washington lobbyists haven't funded my
campaign," said Obama in January, "they won't run my White House and they
will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president."
According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top
five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate
lobbyists.

What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as
Robert Kennedy's. By offering a "new", young and apparently
progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a
member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That
was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory
will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice
movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If
that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

Piracies and dangers

America's war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly
authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which,
the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state
department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or ubversion
against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia
and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight
proxy wars for control of Africa's oil and other riches. With US missiles
soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia's borders, the Cold War is
back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the
presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.

Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream
America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the
normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their
troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their
Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily
brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and
read.

On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches
British liberalism's equivalent last fling. Most of the "philosophy"
of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and
Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in
their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class- based
economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the
British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory,
distinguishable from Blair's new Labour only in the personality of its
leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as
Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.