Covid

MASKING SAVES LIVES

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

More Bad News on Obama -- Justin Raimondo

Portion below; wolething here:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13183

In a future Obama administration, the so-called liberal hawks will have their chief factotum in [Dennis] Ross, who is presumably up for a major role in the Obama administration – perhaps national security adviser, or even secretary of state. That is good news for the tiny yet influential Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party, and very bad news indeed for Obama's anti-interventionist supporters, or even just ordinary war-weary Americans. As Leon Hadar points out:

"Another contingency of liberal hawks occupies positions of influence in Washington think-tanks, including the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, where such scholar-practitioners as former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and Kenneth Pollack have been cheerleaders for the Iraq War and have approved of Bush's policies on Iran and Israel. In fact, one does not have to be a veteran political observer to predict Indyk, Pollack, and other experts on the Middle East, like former peace negotiator Dennis Ross, would probably play a major role in influencing the policy of a future Democratic administration. In that case, the Democratic Party activists who rallied against Joe Lieberman should not be surprised if Bush's Democratic successor ends up pursuing policies that might be described as neoconservatism with a smiling Democratic face."

Ross acted as a front man for the government of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Clinton-era Oslo negotiations, poses as a "peacemaker," shamelessly promotes Israel's interests, and works for AIPAC and AIPAC-affiliated organizations yet strenuously denies there's such a creature as the Israel lobby. He is virtually the living embodiment of business-as-usual insofar as U.S. foreign policy is concerned, and his closeness to Obama – the two stood side-by-side during the candidate's Mideast tour – bodes ill for the antiwar voter shopping around for a viable candidate.

This isn't "change" – it's the same old B.S., rooted in some pretty basic misconceptions. The idea that the U.S. can "solve" – permanently and decisively – the terrorism problem is an illusion ingrained, perhaps, in the American psyche, which is fond of applying metaphors like "get the job done" to complex realities barely comprehensible to the Western mind. It's as if the making of foreign policy were like plumbing, and it's merely a matter of "fixing" things that somehow got broken. That our own policies caused this breakage in the first place, often directly, is almost never acknowledged, and when it is, the proposed "solution" is guaranteed to worsen rather than alleviate the original problem.

The mistakes of the past cannot be undone, but if we learn from them we can minimize the amount of "blowback" that continues to come at us from all directions. Alas, it appears that, no matter who wins the White House this November, a foreign policy made by those who have learned nothing and regret nothing will remain in place.

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