Make the World Safe for Hope

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_02_25/cover.html

[paleorite]

Can Barack Obama, who campaigns as an icon of peace, actually be more bellicose than Bush? Yes, he can.

President Obama would be a warmonger. He would be a wide-eyed, zealous interventionist who would not think twice about using America’s “military muscle” (his words) to overthrow “rogue states” and to suppress America’s enemies, real and imagined. He would go farther even than President Bush in transforming the globe into America’s backyard and staffing it with spies and soldiers. He would relish the “American mission” to police the world and topple tyrannical regimes.

Iraq is the Obamabots’ favorite faultline in the clash of the two Democrat contenders: Clinton supported the invasion and Obama opposed it. An open-and-shut case of one candidate being “for the war” and the other being “against the war,” right? Not quite. Obama’s position over the past five years has been strikingly similar to Clinton’s. And that ought to be an issue of serious concern for Obama’s army of acolytes and the peace protesters who have latched on to his campaign because, as Jeff Taylor pointed out in Counterpunch, “Clinton herself provides no substantive alternative to the neoconservative philosophy of the Bush administration.” Obama is little different from Clinton, and Clinton is little different from Bush.

Yes, Obama described the planned invasion of Iraq as “dumb” and “rash,” but his overriding concern—expressed repetitively throughout the speech—was that the Bush administration was damaging the legitimate case for American-made wars of intervention and potentially making it harder for future administrations (Democratic, for example) to send soldiers around the world to depose unfriendly regimes.

[RightWhale]

Hope was launched last night on the Space Shuttle.

[yldstrk]

cough cough

[ari-freedom]

playing around with nafta and shutting the door to free trade is also not the way to win and keep allies