I sent this letter to Eugene Weekly, but had to cut out a couple of paragraphs to get below their word limit:
Tom Hayden’s August 21 EW essay, “Dreams of Obama,” struck me as weary resignation and damning with faint praise. It is hardly necessary to add to all the negative things he said about Obama, but here are a few.
Obama keeps saying, when we complain about his flip-flopping on the Iraq war, that the American left hasn’t been listening to him. Listen up folks. In a July 26 interview with Newsweek he said that the size of the residual force he would leave in Iraq, after the 16 month withdrawal of the rest, is “entirely conditions-based.” In other words, he’s not going to tell us.
Marjorie Cohn, in a July 29 essay on commondreams.org, writes that “Obama favors leaving between 35,000 and 80,000 U.S. occupation troops indefinitely to train Iraqi security forces and carry out ‘counter-insurgency operations.’”
Obama may de-escalate the war in Iraq, depending on “conditions,” but he’ll just move the troops to Afghanistan, to bomb more wedding parties. We have no more business being in Afghanistan than we do in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is not about 9/11, whose perpetrators came from Saudi Arabia and are now in Pakistan, it’s part of the larger effort to get military control of the Middle East and its oil.
U.S. foreign policy is, and always has been, aggressive and bipartisan. Liberalism has always stopped at the water’s edge. The Democratic-Republican contest is a rivalry between two factions of the rich, a good cop-bad cop con game. Democrats have made a deal with the devil, where they trade a slightly kinder domestic policy for killing large numbers of foreigners.
Both parties have been drifting to the right for decades, as became obvious during the Clinton years. The only hope the American left has is to set up a political force on the left that can threaten Democrats with losing close elections, and make them move to the left to compete for our votes.
Ralph Nader will be on the November ballot, nominated by the newly formed Oregon Peace Party. I’ll be voting for him.
