In the hunt for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination, Barack Obama told an audience last week that as president he would launch an air strike against top leaders of Al Qaeda in Pakistan even if the government refused permission.
It’s easy to see that the Junior Senator from Illinois was trying to regain ground he had lost a couple of weeks ago when he said that within the first year of his administration he would be prepared to meet with America’s foes, the leaders of Cuba, Iran and North Korea among others. Hillary Clinton successfully chided Obama for putting this not very radical proposition on the table.
Obama’s pledge to violate Pakistani sovereignty should a plum target present itself revealed more than the knee-jerk tendency of Democrats to act like tough guys when they are under pressure. It demonstrates that the habits of empire run very deep in US political culture, and are by no means limited to Republicans.
One would have hoped that the disasters that have befallen America as a consequence of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war would have taught American “progressives” that violating international law by invading and bombing sovereign states has weakened the global standing of the US. And Obama is supposed to be a progressive.
What the American political leadership, in both parties, has failed to learn is that Osama bin Laden and his cronies can only threaten America effectively if Americans are dumb enough to play his game by launching unilateral attacks on Muslim countries. End that hopeless strategy and the political oxygen would be sucked out of Al Qaeda.
For Obama, though, that is not the issue. Winning a minor tactical skirmish with Hillary Clinton is what matters and that tells us how deeply the imperial reflex is embedded in the sub-cortex of members of the American political class.
2 comments:
However, Obama's promise of bombing Al Qaeda in Pakistan gains a new dimension when you see it as an threat to the intel establishment that works closely with Pakistan's military secret services, the same services that nurture so-called Al Qaeda. Such attacks would put the presidency at odds with his own intel establishment and would definitely never happen for that reason. The videos emerging from Pakistan, e.g. the Atta/Jarrah sequence last October (five weeks before the general election) are made to order. It would be madness to start destroying the geese that lay the golden terror eggs.
Immediately following Al-Qaeda Policy statement by Obama, he lost much credibility with the progressive and anti-war crowds within the Democratic Party. For certain his most loyal supporters' blogged endlessly about the wisdom of his policy statement, but the damage was done as his poll numbers since the announcement have taken a downward turn.
All polls show he has lost ground to Hillary since the announcement and his approval/disapprovals have made a marked narrowing.
As a Canadian living in America I was quietly rooting for an Obama victory before the announcement. Not anymore.
Along with Obama's "President of Canada" gaffe, I guess we can also kiss away the suggestions by some Canadians that President Barack Obama would cause reverse immigration to America.
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