It's hard to feel sympathy for Obama

as he's victimized by Hillary’s ability

to pick up on the militaristic zeitgeist

and portray herself as the better war chief

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard Obama

refer to the US as “a nation at war”

Obama Nation at War

“OUR COMMANDER IN CHIEF”

I am writing on the chilly morning after Hillary Clinton’s presidential primary victories in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island.

If my perusal of media coverage last night and early today is any indication, the depressing militarization of United States political culture is alive and well.

Take the rhetoric informing and surrounding Hillary’s comeback. She owes part of her reemergence as the potential Democratic presidential nominee to the fact that Barack Obama’s maddeningly mealy-mouthed and deceptive campaign was caught telling Canada not to take his superficial anti-NAFTA rhetoric seriously while he pandered to proletarians in Ohio.

Also contributing to Hilary’s success were escalated revelations surrounding Obama’s relationship with a criminally indicted fundraiser named Tony Rezko – a longtime close associate and patron of the supposedly incorruptible BaRockstar.

But Hillary’s big ace in the hole with her back against the wall was her ability to paint herself out as more qualified than Obama to be – as Hillary’s campaign manager crowed on ABC’s “Nightline” last night – “our commander in chief.”

That was the basic message of her recent and very effective television ad showing a young mother looking in on her children while the stately and imperial Hillary prepared to answer the “red phone” at “three in the morning.”

It takes a real “commander in chief” to “take that call” and do the right thing – bomb the officially and hastily designated Evil Others, or whoever.

That Decider is Hillary-tough-as-nails lived-in-the-White-House-and-through-Bill’s-serial-adultery-and voted-for-the-Iraq-War Clinton.

“All hail the next Protector and Commander in Chief of the American People, Hillary Clinton!”

“A NATION AT WAR”

It is hard to feel a lot of sympathy for Obama as he gets victimized by Hillary’s ability to pick up on the militaristic zeitgeist and portray herself as the better war chief.

I can’t count exactly how many times – I’ve heard Obama refer to the United States as “a nation at war.”

That word choice of his is problematic in two key ways. The first difficulty is that it is false.

Americans are not dodging IEDs, artillery shells, cluster bombs or even suicide bombers on the way to and from American workplaces, schools, shopping malls, and homes.

They are not under attack from other nations’ “foreign fighters” (Bush’s phrase for any non-Iraqi combatant other than a U.S. soldier or mercenary in Mesopotamia), gun-ships, drones, and warplanes – as are many people in American-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.

Their country isn’t suffering a devastating foreign occupation like the one America’s current “commander in chief” has criminally enforced – with the deep complicity and enablement of Hillary, Obama and other top Democrats – on Iraq, leading to a U.S.-imposed Holocaust there.

Where’s the war? The United States is engaged in one-sided imperial violence – a monumentally illegal and immoral war of colonial aggression waged against a weak and impoverished nation many thousands of miles away.

The second problem with Obama’s “nation at war” phrase is that it sustains the militarization of U.S. politics by encouraging the president and presidential candidates to conflate the U.S. civilian majority with the national military caste under the rule of their supposed shared “commander in chief.”

Under the rules since WWII, a “nation at war” is a nation ready to cower under the alleged protective umbrella of the National Security State and to suspend its “normal” civil liberties for “duration” of the danger, officially permanent in the age of the United States’ terrorist war on terror.

And here it might be worth noting, as Matt Gonzales did last week, that,“Obama voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in July 2005, easily the worst attack on civil liberties in the last half-century.

It allows for wholesale eavesdropping on American citizens under the guise of anti-terrorism efforts.”

It was an interesting vote for a candidate who frequently refers to his background as a civil rights lawyer.

OBAMA'S ANTIWAR "FAIRY TALE”

It gets harder yet to sympathize with Obama’s victimization by Hillary's militarism when we realize that Bill Clinton (a militaristic warrior in own right) was absolutely correct to denounce Obama’s anti(Iraq)war persona as “fairy tale” campaign imagery.

One day before he gave his famous Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic Convention, the “antiwar” Obama told the New York Times that he wasn’t sure how he would have voted on the U.S. Congress’s fateful 2002 Iraq war resolution had he been serving in the United States Senate at the time.

Here is the relevant Times passage: “In a recent interview, [Obama] declined to criticize Senators Kerry and Edwards for voting to authorize the war, although he said he would not have done the same based on the information he had at the time.' But, I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports,' Mr. Obama said. 'What would I have done? I don’t know.’”

The very next day Obama was quoted as follows in the Chicago Tribune: “there’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.”

It’s hard to imagine a more graphic statement of the bipartisan military-imperial consensus than that.

The Tribune added that Obama “now believes U.S. forces must remain to stabilize the war-ravaged nation – a position not dissimilar to the current approach of the Bush administration.”

As Gonzales asks, “why wouldn’t [Obama] have taken the opportunity to urge withdrawal if he truly opposed the war?

Was he trying to signal to conservative voters that he would subjugate his anti-war position if elected to the U.S. Senate and perhaps support a lengthy occupation? Well, as it turns out,” Gonzales added with the wisdom of hindsight, “he’s done just that.”

OBAMA HAS NEVER OPPOSED US AGGRESSION

Obama has never opposed the “war” (naked and one-sided U.S. imperial aggression) on the same terms as the actual antiwar movement.

His much-ballyhooed “antiwar speech” in Chicago during the fall of 2002 followed much conventional wisdom in the foreign policy establishment by criticizing “dumb wars” but said nothing about the obviously criminal and imperial, oil-motivated nature of the great international and human rights transgression Cheney and Bush were preparing for Iraq and the world.

In the part of his famous 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address (generally credited with producing his national celebrity) that came closest to directly criticizing the Iraq invasion, Obama suggested that the Bush administration had “fudged the numbers” and "shad[ed] the truth" about why "our young men and women” were “sent into harm's way."

He added that the U.S. must “care for [soldiers’] families while they’re gone, tend to the soldiers upon their return, and never go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world."

Morally cognizant and reasonably informed listeners were left to wonder what he thought about the large number of Iraqis killed and maimed as a result of U.S. invasion by the summer of 2004.

What about the massive harm U.S. forces were ordered to inflict on Iraqis, considerably greater than the damage they experienced? These were nonexistent topics in The Speech that turned the “antiwar” Obama into an overnight BaRockstar.

"SHADE OF TRUTH"

“Securing the peace" was a morally impoverished and nationally arrogant, self-serving way for Obama to describe the real White House objective in Iraq by the summer of 2004:

To pacify, by force when (quite) necessary, the outraged populace of a nation that understandably resented a brazenly imperial invasion it saw (with good reason) as driven (as even Alan Greenspan half admits) by the United States’ desire to deepen its control of Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil.

And “shade the truth" didn’t come close to doing justice to the high-state deception - the savage, sinister, and sophisticated lying - that the Bush administration used and is still using to cover their real agenda, understood with no small accuracy by the people of Iraq.

It’s not much of a "war," moreover, when the most powerful military state in history attacks and occupies a weak nation it has already devastated over decades of military assault and "economic sanctions."

Obama has repeatedly voted to spend billions on the invasion since his arrival in the U.S. Senate. He has inveighed against the antiwar “Tom Hayden wing of the Democratic Party” and has told congressional Democrats they would be “playing chicken with the troops” if they dared to actually (imagine) de-fund the Cheney-Bush “war.”

He voted to confirm as Secretary of State (of all things) the mendacious war criminal Condoleezza Rice, who played a critical role in advancing the preposterous Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) claims Bush used to invade Iraq.

He distanced himself from fellow Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin when Durbin faced vicious right-wing attacks for daring to tell some basic truths about U.S. torture practices in Iraq.

OBAMA AGAINST ANTIWAR PROGRESSIVES

Obama used his considerable political and campaign finance muscle to back centrist Democrats against antiwar progressives in numerous Congressional primaries in 2006.

He even supported the neoconservative Joe Lieberman - his self-chosen Senate mentor – against the antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont in Connecticut.

After their attainment of a majority in the Congress in November of 2006, Obama warned Democrats against being seen as working against the remarkably unpopular and arch-criminal Cheney-Bush administration.

Obama has repeatedly and absurdly claimed that the illegal invasion was launched with the “best of [democratic] intentions.” He has never acknowledged the criminal nature of the “strategic blunder” - his recurrent kind description of the occupation atrocity.

Despite the documented occurrence of numerous U.S. atrocities there, he praises U.S. military personnel for their “unquestioning” “service” in Iraq and for “doing everything we could ever ask of them.”

His belated calls for withdrawal are hedged by numerous statements indicating that an Obama White House would maintain a significant military presence in and around Iraq for an indefinite period of time.

And Obama has refused to support taking a reckless (possibly even nuclear) U.S. military assault on Iran off “the table” of acceptable U.S. foreign policy options.

Obama couldn’t bother to be present on the Senate floor to vote against the Bush’s administration’s provocative, saber-rattling move to define Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as “an international terrorist organization.”

So while it’s a shame to see the more openly and (I think) dangerously imperialist and militarist Hillary Clinton making a comeback of any kind, it will be hard to get too teary if Obama is crucified on the cross of militarized politics.