Time bombs tossed seemingly casually in the past month by his vice president and his secretary of state disclose President Obama, in the dawn of his first term, already the target of carefully meditated onslaughts by senior members of his own cabinet.
At the superficial level, Obama is presiding over an undisciplined administration; on a more realistic and sinister construction, he is facing mutiny, publicly conducted by two people who only a year ago were claiming that their qualifications to be in the Oval Office were far superior to those of the junior senator from Illinois.
The great danger to Obama posed by Biden’s and Clinton’s “time bombs” (a precisely correct description if we call them political, not diplomatic, time bombs) is not international confusion and ridicule over what precisely are the US government’s policies, but a direct onslaught on his presidency by a domestic Israeli lobby that is so out of control that it renders ridiculous Obama’s puny attempt to stop settlements — or to curb Israeli aggression in any other way. Take Joe Biden. A month ago, he gave Israel the green light to bomb Iran, only to be swiftly corrected by his boss. At the time it seemed yet another somewhat comical mile marker in a lifetime of gaffes, perpetrated in the cause of self-promotion and personal political advantage.
But Biden’s subsequent activities invite a darker construction. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s Moscow visit, the air still soft with honeyed words about a new era of trust and cooperation, Biden headed for Ukraine and Georgia, harshly and publicly ridiculing Russia as an economic basket case with no future. In Tbilisi, he told the Georgian parliament that the US would continue helping Georgia “to modernize” its military and that Washington “fully supports” Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO and help Tbilisi to meet the alliance’s standards. This elicited a furious reaction from Moscow, pledging sanctions against any power rearming Georgia.
Georgia could play a vital, enabling role, in the event that Israel decides to attack Iran’s nuclear complex. The flight path from Israel to Iran is diplomatically and geographically challenging. On the other hand, Georgia is perfectly situated as the takeoff point for any such raid. Israel has been heavily involved in supplying and training Georgia’s armed forces. President Saakashvili has boasted that his defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, and also Temur Yakobashvili, the minister responsible for negotiations over South Ossetia, lived in Israel before moving to Georgia, adding, “Both war and peace are in the hands of Israeli Jews.” On the heels of Biden’s shameless pandering in Tbilisi, Secretary of State Clinton took herself off to Thailand for an international confab with Asian leaders and let drop to a TV chat show that “a nuclear Iran could be contained by a US ‘defense umbrella’” — actually, a nuclear defense umbrella
for Israel and for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, too. The Israel lobby has
been promoting the idea of a US “nuclear umbrella” for some years, with
one of its leading exponents being Dennis Ross, now in charge of Middle
Eastern policy on Obama’s National Security Council.
In her campaign last year, Clinton flourished the notion as an example
of the sort of policy initiative that set her apart from that novice in
foreign affairs, Barack Obama.
From any rational point of view, the “nuclear umbrella” is an awful
idea, redolent with all the gimcrack theology of the high Cold War era,
about “first strike,” “second strike,” “stable deterrence,” “controlled
escalation” and “mutual assured destruction” used to sell US
escalations in nuclear arms production, from Kennedy and the late
Robert McNamara (“the Missile Gap”) to Reagan (“Star Wars”).
Indeed, as one Pentagon veteran remarked to me earlier this week, “the
administration’s whole nuclear stance is turning into a cheesy rerun of
the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, all based on a horrible
exaggeration of one or two Iranian nuclear bombs that the Persians may
be too incompetent to build and most certainly are too incompetent to
deliver.”
The Biden and Clinton “foreign” policy is: 1) to recreate the same old
Cold War (with a new appendage, the US versus Iran nuclear
confrontation) for the same old reasons: to pump up domestic defense
spending; and 2) to continue 60 years of supporting Israeli
expansionism for the same reasons that every president from Harry to
Dubya (perhaps barring Ike) did so: to corner Israel lobby money and
votes. Regarding the latter, Obama did the same by grabbing the
Chicago-based Crown and Pritzker family money very early in his
campaign and by making Rahm Emanuel his very first appointment (the two
are hardly unrelated).
So right from the start, Obama was already an Israel-lobby fellow
traveler. The Mitchell appointment and the toothless blather about
settlements were simply cosmetics, bones tossed to the increasing
proportion of the American electorate that’s grossed out by the ethnic
cleansing of the Arabs from the Holy Land. Obama does have a coherent
strategy: keep the defense money flowing and increasing, but without
making so much noise as the older generation did about ancient Cold War
enemies (e.g., Russia and Cuba). The F-22 — to date, the one and only
presidential issue on which he’s shown any toughness at all — is in no
sense a departure from keeping the money flowing, since he is indeed
increasing the defense budget, in part by using the F-22 cancellation
to push spending on the even worse F-35 and to hide his acquiescence to
all the other pork in the Congressional defense budget.
The window for any new president to impose a decisive change in foreign
policy comes in the first three months, before opposition has time to
solidify.
Obama squandered that opportunity, stocking his foreign policy team
with tarnished players such as Ross. As the calculated indiscretions of
Biden and Clinton suggest, not to mention the arrogance of Netanyahu
and his political associates, the window of opportunity has closed.
Would it have been that hard to signal a change in course? Not really.
Obama could have excited the world by renouncing the Bush
administration’s assertion, in the “National Defense Strategy of the
United States” in 2002, of the right and intention of the United States
to preemptively attack any country “at the time, place, and in the
manner of our choosing.” As William Polk, the State Department’s Middle
East adviser in the Kennedy era, wrote last year: “As long as this
remains a valid statement of American policy, the Iranian government
would be foolish not to seek a nuclear weapon.”
But Obama, surrounded with Clinton-era veterans of NATO expansionism
and, as his Accra speech indicated, hobbled with an impeccably
conventional view of how the world works, is rapidly being overwhelmed
by the press of events. He’s bailed out the banks. He’s transferred war
from Iraq to Afghanistan. The big lobbies know they have him on the run.
Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch.
Copyright 2009 Creators.Com
