EcoLogics

Tell me who your friends are and I will know who you are.

February 4th was the day when the last nails went into the coffin of the hope that Obama represented to peace-loving, and democractic people.

The coffin was several months in the making. When we thought that he stood for a new world order regarding the Middle East, Obama made a hard-right speech last summer to the Israeli Lobby in which he promised AIPAC an undivided Jerusalem. To anyone familiar with the history of Zionism, that is synonymous with saying that Arab groups will not be allowed to claim as their own—and it is their own—the East Jerusalem occupied by the Israelis since the Six–Day War.

No wonder the delegates of AIPAC were surprised and pleased; at the time, not even Israel itself was daring to make that claim in public. To suggest, as the Obama camp did afterwards, that Obama was misquoted or misinterpreted was disingenuous; indeed, it was almost as disingenuous as pretending, at the height of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, that Obama could not offer an opinion on the Israeli assassination of hundreds of civilians or the targeting of the UN HQ in Gaza with white phosphorous shells because George W. Bush was still the president.

When we thought that Obama would take a big broom to the corrupt Washington, and would use it to sweep away the most important symbols of the Bush administration’s war (itself not only an illegal, but a corrupt war), Obama slapped us in the face. He left Gates as Secretary of Defence, and named Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State. However moderate by Bush standards, Robert Gates played a central role in managing the illegal occupation of Iraq, and that makes him a war criminal. Hillary Clinton supported the war, and so was part of the political order that enabled George W. Bush to get away, quite literally, with murder.

Let there be no misunderstanding: of course politics is a ruthless game, and after the election Obama no doubt felt that he needed to do something to include and appease the republicans who voted for him, and the people who voted for Clinton. That, however, does not really contradict the point being made here. Anyone who thinks that there is no link between the rise of the kind of politics represented by George W. Bush and the Clinton administration needs to think again; even after acknowledging that the religious right made a grotesque scene out of the Monica Lewinski affair, it is clear that the Clintons and their coterie were an integral part of the U.S. drift to an increasingly corrupt and right-wing politics—a drift that, as coupled to the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, made it possible for Nixon’s neocons to roar back into power, and to begin to dismantle the U.S. system of checks and balances.

If you think this is harsh, and that there is no continuity between the Clinton years and the Bush years, consider how many Democrats have had to be excluded from Obama’s administration, or have had to give up their new posts days if not hours after accepting them. Or look at the rise of Rahm Emanuel, the man whom Obama chose as his chief–of–staff. Emanuel, a former Clinton apparatchik, is not only Zionist—we return to the Israel Lobby—but a hardcore neoliberal and Iraq War apologist, a man with a history of virulent, some might say violent loyalty to those in power (EcoLogics is mindful of the oft-quoted passage, cited in Emanuel’s Wikipedia entry, that in the 1996 election ‘Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting ‘Dead! … Dead! … Dead!’ and plunging the knife into the table after every name’.)

Emanuel is just one, albeit a particularly aggressive, example of the kind of Clinton-era operatives that now permeate the Obama administration. This is as much a sign of the Clintons’ lingering power, as it is of Obama’s obvious lack of discomfort with this political caste. It signals not just a return to Democrat business as usual, but a complete contradiction of most of the things that Obama reportedly stood for.

The list of contradictions to Obama’s carefully nurtured image of a peace-loving democrat could go on and on, but EcoLogics will mention just two more events, both of which came to light on February 4th. The first was analysed in yesterday’s blog (Obama, Miliband, and Torture), and involves Obama’s deception vis-a-vis the U.S.’s policy on torture and extraordinary renditions. It now seems likely that where Bush went for out–and–out torture (torture practiced almost publicly, and publicly defended by Dick Cheney), Obama is going back to the older modus operandi of discrete torture, torture practiced subtly but denounced in public, as opposed to torture practiced routinely if not crowed in public. If any political realist is reading this and thinking, ‘get real, it was always thus’, then you’ve just made EcoLogics’ point: Obama does not stand for democratic change, he stands for a change back to what the U.S. stood for before Bush came to power.

The second and last event is the one that involves the crowning insult to anyone who is a political liberal, let alone anyone committed to the political left. The event was announced in an unfortunately titled article in the Guardian yesterday, ‘Barak Obama makes Tony Blair his unofficial “first friend”‘ . The article reported that Obama said that “I want to thank my good friend Tony Blair for coming today [to the annual National Prayer Breakfast], somebody who did it first and perhaps did it better than I will do. He has been an example for so many people around the world of what dedicated leadership can accomplish. And we are very grateful to him.”

‘Somebody who did it first’?! ‘Dedicated leadership’? ‘An example for so many people’?! Is Obama referring to the fact that Blair has condoned Israeli State Terrorism? Or is he referring to the fact that Blair was the man who, along with George W. Bush, deliberately deceived the world about Iraq’s so-called WMDs? Or perhaps he refers to Blair the man who brought to power the likes of Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett, both of whom were forced to quit in corrupt disgrace, but who then weaseled their way back into power? Or perhaps Obama refers to Blair the man whose virulent neoliberalism took the UK where Thatcher herself never dared to go, the man whose political partnership with Gordon Brown led to the current economic collapse—a collapse which, however linked to similar policies in the U.S., is also home–grown. The depression (in Brown’s own words, yesterday) is an economic calamity for which Blair must shoulder a significant portion of the blame: it was in Blair’s years as prime minister that the markets were allowed to run wild, and it is still Blairites that are pushing for even more privatisation, even more radically neoliberal reform. Oh, and let us not forget, while we’re at it, that Blair took up a post as an adviser in none other than J P Morgan.

Viewed from these perspectives, Blair did ‘do it first’, if by this one refers to the British prime minister who did away with some of the UK’s most fundamental civil liberties, and the man who looked the other way when Britain’s biggest–ever protest march took place to repudiate the Bush–Blairite conspiracy vis-a-vis Iraq, and the man who ushered in corporate clientelism on a scale that even the Tories never quite managed.

EcoLogics is emphatically atheist, but the expression ‘God help us all’ is the only one that seems capable of expressing the horror that begins to be felt by true democrats at the prospect of a U.S. president who is increasingly proving to be an ideological replicant of the very people he so persuasively trounced in the primary, and then in the national, elections. Perhaps we should adapt the saying quoted at the outset of this post: tell me who your advisers are and I will know what kind of a president you are.