by Rupen Savoulian, January 8, 2012
Editors Comment: In this rather exhaustive article, Rupen Savoulian has shown in a remarkably clear-sighted way how the American two-party system functions in practice and what sort of policies the two parties follow domestically and in foreign affairs. With the sort of power yielded by special interest groups, especially the military-industrial complex, the candidates of the two parties vying to reach the White House devise their strategies and manipulations tailored to meet the powerful backers. The author has a clear perception of how such political gimmicks translate into practice in forming policies of the Savage Empire in these times. In discussing the Bush-Cheney regime and the present administration of Obama, he provides a general political context before dealing with the specifics of the topic under discussion.
What emerges from Rupen Savoulian’s article is a clear picture of the deceptive nature of Obama’s polices in contrast to his initial false promises that played fraud upon ordinary citizens. But this was nothing of a hat-trick but rather a systemic prerequisite in the inherent power politics of the United States. Therefore, when Obama used anti-war feelings of the people against the Bush-Cheney’s wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was simply adhering to the common practice of deception that defines the American political system. Once in power, he not only carried on the polices of his predecessor, but also extended the imperial wars of aggression. In reality, this oily-tongued demagogue has been more cunning a president than Bush!
The author has presented his views in a candid and clear fashion. He has shown how the US imperialism under Bush and now under Obama has been instrumental in keeping the people of the Middle East in bondage to the U.S. imperial interests by supporting dictators, kings and despots. I view this article as an important contribution to exposing the role of American war-mongering power elite and the weapon producers. US imperialism’s global power and its Savage Empire exists on two wings: military power and false propaganda. An honest observer of American imperialism cannot combat the U.S. military power; but he or she has the moral power to expose the false propaganda and global deception played by the imperialists. This, the author does so well; his exposure of the militarists and war criminals in this article is splendid.
–Nasir Khan, Editor
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Bigoted Republicans, Deceptive Democrats and the onward march of a police state
by Rupen Savoulian, Antipodean Atheist, January 8, 2012
It is easy to attack the US Republicans, because they
openly express their bigotry, hatred and their woeful incompetence is plain for all to see. One of the previous frontrunners for the Republican party nomination, Herman Cain,
demonstrated his terrible ineptness when attempting to answer a simple question about US policy towards Libya, an important issue given the Libyan uprising and subsequent NATO intervention in 2011. Add to that the expression of racist ignorance by Newt Gingrinch who
contemptuously called the Palestinians an ‘invented people’, the
‘brain freeze’ of Rick Perry, and the
homophobic rantings of Rick Santorum, and it is easy to see that the US Republicans are a pack of floundering buffoons. Sherry Wolf, socialist activist, public speaker and associate editor of the
International Socialist Review, said it best when she wrote that this parade of ultra-reactionary Republican dinosaurs
proves that in US politics “you could walk into any bar in Brooklyn and find 7 drunks more qualified to run the country.”
It is obvious to any political observer that the US Republicans will
cut social expenditure, cut back education, health care and public transportation, all the while increasing funding for the US military-industrial complex. The current speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, Republican from Ohio, is in the
pocket of the large tobacco companies, maintains close relations with big tobacco company executives, and has fought for the interests of the tobacco companies in Washington. In other words, the Republicans are backed by very wealthy supporters, and will use their money and connections to roll back any gains made by working people.
Obama and his supporters will highlight the ignorant, reactionary ravings of his opponents to garner support for his reelection campaign. The Obama Democrats will emphasize any difference, however minuscule, to co-opt the electorate and win a second term in office. What is harder to recognise is the role of the US Democrats, particularly under Barack Obama, in continuing the Bush-Cheney policies, whether it be on the issue of civil liberties, challenging the untrammeled greed and pervasive financial corruption of Wall Street, or on the big questions of US wars overseas.
Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony
Back in 1982, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder released a single called ‘
Ebony and Ivory.’ It was a corny, superficial song, ostensibly meant to demonstrate that people of different skin colour can and should work together. Noble sentiments, even if it was expressed in a simplistic, juvenile touching sort of way.
The lyrics speak of how people of all colours can all live and work together. Subsequent history has proven them to be correct – but not in the way the songwriters intended. The vicious, snarling ‘ivory’ of the Bush-Cheney cabal has been replaced by the smiling, touchy-feely ‘ebony’ Obama. The faces have changed, but the underlying course remains the same.
The Bush-Cheney regime was widely despised by the US working class (and governments overseas) as an administration ruling in the interests of the financial-industrial oligarchy. Its propaganda was exposed as war-mongering, and geared towards provoking confrontations with recalcitrant regimes in developing countries, intended to start expansionist wars and advance US imperial objectives. Growing opposition to these imperialist wars, and the steady erosion of civil liberties and democratic safeguards, prompted a change of tactics by the governing military-industrial-financial complex. Obama dutifully exploited the growing antiwar sentiment, and general revulsion against a narrow cabal that ruled to promote the interests of a super-rich elite to get elected. He made many promises to end wars, stop the indefinite detentions and renditions of suspects, and generally promote socially progressive economic policies domestically.
Now we can see that Obama posed as an antiwar candidate only to coopt the antiwar movement, and he quickly exposed his true colours soon after taking office. The election of Obama was a tactical shift by the US ruling class from open warfare to more covert forms of intervention, including Predator drone strikes, escalating anti-terrorism laws to lock up an ever increasing number of suspects, cracking down on insurgencies by using private security contractors (ie mercenaries), redesigning the Iraqi and Afghani occupations to make them less conspicuous but no less intrusive, and making cosmetic changes to the US economy while promoting the interests of the Wall Street elite. Not only has Obama started more imperialist wars overseas, he has nullified the Nuremberg laws by promoting the doctrine of ‘pre-emptive war’, a doctrine that was considered a war crime at the end of World War Two. He has refined the Bush-era doctrine of ‘regime change’, and he has promoted/coopted internal opposition groups to instigate covert regime change in the targeted countries. When that tactic fails, Obama has employed direct and lethal force.
Attack on civil liberties
Obama, the ‘yes we can’ president, promised a wave of changes after the Bush-Cheney regime was exposed as a corrupt, malignant, war-mongering administration. Yet, since taking office after the 2008 elections, Obama has escalated the Bush-era
attacks on civil liberties. The recently passed National Defence Authorisation Act, signed into law by President Obama in December 2011, contains clauses 1031 and 1032 that
empower the US military to indefinitely detain any person – US citizens or otherwise – any person suspected of terrorism offences, or providing support for terrorist groups. This law repeals the fundamental human right of
habeas corpus, and provides
more scaffolding for an emerging police state structure in the United States. And this act also provides another $662 billion dollars for the US military to continue its predatory wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Obama has failed to close Guantanamo, and has overseen the construction of another Guantanamo-style secret prison in
Bagram airbase, Afghanistan. The courageous journalist Anand Gopal investigated the
existence of secret prisons, who stated that “there is a vast complex network of prisons across Afghanistan, mostly situated on US military bases.”
When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, Obama repudiated the international law laid down at Nuremberg more than 60 years ago, by advocating preemptive war. The
Nuremberg trials, held in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, established the precedent that heads of state who plan and execute aggressive wars of expansion are guilty of war crimes and crime against humanity. Senior government leaders were held accountable for their decisions that cost the lives of millions of people. The international community expressly repudiated ‘preventive’ war in the context of German imperialism’s drive to establish economic and political domination in Europe. The US ruling class, seeking to dominate vast areas of the globe, escalated its drive to achieve economic supremacy in the early 1990s with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Obama, the allegedly ‘liberal’ Democrat President, extended the policy of establishing US economic hegemony by invoking the outlawed policy of ‘preventive war’. In so many words, aggressive and predatory wars are now an official part of US foreign policy, as elaborated by the fictional ‘anti-war’ President Obama.
The assassination of people overseas – euphemistically called ‘targeted killings’ – is an innovation for which Obama deserves full credit. Killings by unmanned Predator drones have been a
characteristic feature of Obama’s administration. Rather than capture Osama Bin Laden and put him on trial, thus demonstrating the evidence of his guilt for all the world to see,
Obama deemed it more appropriate to kill him. Bin Laden,
a nonentity rendered obsolete by the forward-currents of history in the words of Robert Fisk, was sheltered in Pakistan, a solid US client state. Killing Bin Laden ensured that whatever secrets he had, died with him. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni cleric was assassinated on Obama’s orders back in September 2011. His status as a US citizen, and all the constitutional protections afforded by that status, did not matter to the Obama administration.
Targeted killings were authorised by the Obama administration in February 2010 by then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis C Blair (retired). Obama knew that Blair had ties to the Indonesian military, a force guilty of serious human rights abuses including mass murder, rape and torture during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. In 1999, as the Indonesian forces went on a murderous rampage killing thousands of East Timorese, Blair as commander-in-chief of US forces in the Pacific, was ordered to convey to Indonesian general Wiranto to close down the pro-Indonesian militias. Blair meet with Wiranto, but offered further US military assistance to Indonesia. Wiranto continued to direct the militias that were murdering thousands of East Timorese.
The executive branch of government is now judge, jury and executioner. Awlaki was never convicted, or even charged, with any crime. He was accused by the corporate press as a hate-mongering preacher, and that seemed to be enough to condemn him. Well, the US is renowned for producing hateful preachers – Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, John Hagee – but they are Christian hate-mongers so that is okay.
Yemen, Saudi Arabia and undermining democracy
The killing of Awlaki occurred in Yemen, soon after the return from temporary exile of the Yemeni dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Yemen has been convulsed by a courageous, continuing uprising that began in January 2011. The dictator Saleh has been a solid ally of the United States since he took power in 1978. The anti-regime protests, like similar uprisings throughout the Arab world, have shaken the regime, and the US is seeking a way to engineer an outcome that protects its interests while mollifying the protesters with some concessions. While Saleh has safeguarded US interests in Yemen, and has cooperated wholeheartedly with that other US client regime Saudi Arabia, the US intends that any post-Saleh regime will not harm US interests. The Obama administration has worked to moderate the demands of the protesters, encouraging the Yemeni regime to make cosmetic changes while preserving the main repressive state and economic apparatus intact. Obama is no friend of democracy and human rights in the Middle East, and as if to underscore the point, Obama approved a multi-billion
dollar arms deal with the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia. Rather than encourage democratisation and support the brave people who have risen up in the Middle East,
Obama has sought to maintain the repressive status quo, make certain limited concessions, and direct any political change towards a social outcome friendly to US interests.
We saw the same realpolitik calculations applied by the United States in the case of the Libyan uprising. Qadhafi’s regime had started as a pan-Arab, semi-socialist project that considerably developed the country’s infrastructure and improved the education and health care of the population. In the 1970s and 1980s Qadhafi provided an Arab Nasserist model of development. From the early 1990s, he began a Sadat-style reversal, opening up the country to pockets of private investment. By the early 2000s, he joined the US ‘war on terror’ and his regime had deteriorated into a Western-friendly dictatorship with ties to big European capital. The uprising that began in early 2011 resembled the similar protests in Tunisia and Egypt. Qadhafi waged a brutal counterinsurgency war to stamp out the rebels. Initially, the US was tepid in its response to the uprising – it was essentially playing a waiting game to see if Qadhafi, whose weapons had been supplied by the West, could defeat the insurgents. After all, the Western powers’ intelligence agencies were cooperating with the Qadhafi regime,
the latter a useful ally in the ‘war on terror’.
However, once it became clear that the Qadhafi loyalists could not comprehensively defeat the rebels, the Obama administration moved swiftly to support setting up a ‘no-fly zone’, on the excuse that it was motivated by humanitarian considerations in preventing a genocide of Libyan people. Qadhafi’s counterinsurgency was brutal and savage – no less brutal and savage than the countless counterinsurgency wars launched by the US and its proxies in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries where the US has supported dictatorial regimes in suppressing popular uprisings. NATO intervention in that conflict has meant that any post-Qadhafi regime will be
beholden to the interests and needs of big European and American capital. Tariq Ali described it as
‘selective vigilantism’, bombing Libya to install a pro-Western Transitional National Council, while shoring up the despots in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen. As the
Socialist Worker magazine explained, the ‘noble aims’ of the West, ‘preventing massacres’ in Libya, is always exposed as a fraud by the greater crimes and atrocities of the imperial powers and their proxies, such as the
NATO siege and obliteration of the town of Sirte, and the
ethnic-cleansing of black African townships by the rebel forces which amount to crimes against humanity. Just to be clear about the real victors in Libya, the New York Times documented that while profit-making opportunities have receded in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have
opened up exponentially in post-Qadhafi Libya.
Fake withdrawal
At the end of 2011, Obama announced that all American combat troops have left Iraq, thus fulfilling a campaign promise of 2008 to end that conflict. But upon closer inspection, that withdrawal was just as fake as the Bush-era ‘Mission Accomplished” theatrics. Not only is the US leaving behind 50 000 residual troops in the country, the largest US embassy in the world happens to be in Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands of private security contractors, ie. mercenaries, will continue to carry out counter-insurgency operations. Remaining American forces in Iraq will be rebranded as ‘advisors’ and ‘trainers’, obscuring their role as an occupying force. Obama exerted tremendous pressure on his proxy in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to provide legal immunity for all US troops in Iraq. Maliki and the Iraqi government did not provide such a blanket exemption, because that measure would have meant political suicide for the fragile coalition headed by Maliki. With the Iraqis refusing to grant blanket immunity from prosecution, the US had no choice but to
stage a withdrawal for public consumption and hide the scale of the US debacle in that country.
Sectarian violence has been incited by the Bush and Obama administrations, in order to divide and rule. 40 000 thousand American troops are stationed at bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, supported by the US air force and navy aircraft carriers – all in close proximity to Iraq. As Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York Stony Brook, has commented, Obama has reduced the ambitious scope to transform Iraq into an aggressive ally of Israel (an objective inherited from the Bush-Cheney days), but he has
redesigned the Iraqi occupation to make it less conspicuous and placate his critics, and pursue the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the country. The US occupation has destroyed a functioning society, ruined the health care, electricity, medical and educational services, and left sectarian enclaves under the control of a US-controlled dictatorship in Baghdad.
Embracing Wall Street
Obama has been accused by his Democrat supporters, like veteran journalist Robert Scheer, of
abandoning his electoral base by failing to tackle the predatory criminality of the Wall Street financial elite. However, Obama has consistently advocated the cause of the Wall Street bankers and financial speculators whose corrupt practices led to the global financial crash of 2008. He has done nothing to bring those responsible for that financial ruin to account, and instead has opted to shift the cost of that crisis onto working people. While it is obvious that the US Republicans oppose regulations for the financial sector and intend on continuing the policies of reckless financial speculation, Obama packed his cabinet with Wall Street representatives and economists with strong connections to the Wall Street bankers. Back in 2008, Obama (with agreement from Republican John McCain) gave the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the authority to supply $700 billion from federal funds in order to bail out the big banks, buying up the worthless mortgage-supported securities thus acquiring the debts accumulated by the private sector. In other words, the private sector can rack up an enormous debt, but the public will be required to foot the bill. In 2008, Obama appointed Mary Schapiro to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Schapiro is a long-term Wall Street insider, and a solid representative of the big investment banks and financial institutions. This demonstrates that Obama is a servant of the financial plutocracy, and is not going to confront the people responsible for the financial crisis.
In September 2010, Obama made it perfectly clear that his government was no enemy of big business. In a speech entitled
‘Investing in America’ given to a CNBC-organised event broadcast by that channel from Washington, Obama dropped all the rhetoric against ‘fat cats’ and openly praised the ‘free market’ as the answer to the country’s economic problems. He talked about ‘partnering with Wall Street’ to revive the economy, and declared that “”In every speech, every interview that I have made, I’ve constantly said what sets America apart, what has made us successful over long term, is we’ve got the most dynamic free-market economy in the world.” A clear statement of an entrepreneur’s fantasy-philosophy.
It is time to
occupy wall street, and remove the pretense that the US Democrats represent some kind of labour-friendly alternative. The Occupy movement,
having spread to Australia, focuses on the malignant influence of the corporate hierarchy in subverting political democracy. The defence of jobs, health care, education, social services and our democratic rights needs to focus on the immense concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny financial oligarchy. Socialists, activists, and all those concerned about the growing criminality of the US ruling class need to
merge with and strengthen the Occupy movement, and reject the danger of falling into the trap of tailing the Democrat party.
Glenn Greenwald has stated that
Obama is abandoning the basic principles of the Democrat party, leading the charge to cutback social security, health care, continuing to promote Bush-era policies on indefinite detention, torture of rendition suspects, assassinating US citizens (and others) without any regard for due process, and building secret prisons. It is time to bluntly state that Obama is a mass murderer and war criminal, and belongs in the dock with Bush and Cheney.
A man waves a Russian flag during a rally November 21, 1988 (MF/AA/REUTERS Pictures)
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The Guantánamo detention facility has become a symbol of torture© US DoD
