By Dan Hamburg
Almost of a year ago, I wrote an editorial for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat in which I called on Barack Obama to be the hero the country so sorely needed (“We Need a Hero”, SRPD, 1/18/09). I pointed back in time to the flush of hope that greeted Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, hope that was slowly strangulated over eight bumpy years. Would Obama’s tenure follow a similar trajectory?
So far, the trajectory is clear and it is not good. Obama’s first year, and particularly the current health care debacle, has served only to amplify the fact that the government of our country has been wrested out of the peoples’ hands. It is government, as Ralph Nader pointed out over a decade ago, “of the Exxons, by the General Motors, and for the DuPonts.” Meanwhile, the corporations slyly deflect anger onto the government for the dysfunctional society that has resulted.
This is a society in which the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider and the working class forks it over for the transgressions of the über-class. It’s a society in which health care is considered a privilege, tens of millions of homes are “under water”, millions of well-paying industrial jobs have been outsourced and both public and private debt have spun out of control. It’s a society that condones perpetual war in service to a vast armaments industry hidden from a distracted public. As Michael Lerner points out, it’s a society that “leaves people hungry not only for life’s necessities, but for ethical and spiritual fulfillment as well.”
The failure to reach a meaningful agreement in Copenhagen, whether blamed on the U.S. or China, underscores the seriousness of our predicament as a nation and as a species. The final score showed that the U.S. couldn’t “get an agreement done” and that demonstrated, more than anything, that we are no longer the lone superpower.
The most horrible manifestation of the current moral, ethical and legal vacuum—worse even than the bankster hijacking—is the nearly decade-old wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars demonstrate with crystal clarity that very little remains of the principles upon which this country was theoretically founded. We are reduced to fighting wars that, as even Alan Greenspan acknowledged, can only be accurately described as “resource wars”.
As journalist Pepe Escobar wrote recently in Asia Times regarding the AfPak war, “Once again, since the late 1990s, it all comes back to TAPI – the Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/Pakistan/India gas pipeline, the key reason Afghanistan (as an energy transit corridor) is of any strategic importance to the US, apart from being deployed as an aircraft carrier stationed right at the borders of geopolitical competitors China and Russia.”
Barack Obama understands this. He also knows that beneath the ground in Afghanistan is a rich store of uranium, tungsten, molybdenum and rare earths (used for everything from TVs to superconductors to Priuses). And the corporations that supply the missiles, the surveillance equipment, the helicopters and the fighter jets know that Obama understands this. Why else would they have made him the most heavily funded presidential candidate in history?
In fulfillment of his backroom pledge to the armchair warriors of the military-industrial complex, President Obama has now signed the largest military budget in the history of the United States, larger than the combined budgets of the rest of the planet. And now this military is being more intensively turned on a semi-literate people who are engaged in a decades-long civil war. Florida Democrat Alan Grayson put it succinctly, “This is an 18th century strategy being employed against a 14th century enemy.”
Military intelligence inside the Obama administration estimates that there are approximately 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country of Afghanistan. This is the “cancer” that the president says justifies sending 30,000 additional troops at a cost of $30 billion a year. Once the latest Obama surge is in place, the US will have nearly twice as many troops and contractors in Afghanistan than the USSR at the height of their south Asian misadventure of the late 1980s.
While the military, political and economic elites belief in American exceptionalism—the unquestioned goodness and correctness of the United States—remain impervious to both reason and morality, there are larger forces at work. Every empire in history that acted with stupidity and impunity has been brought down; this empire will fare no better,
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Dan Hamburg was Second District Mendocino County supervisor from 1981-85 and a District 1 California Congressman from 1993-95. He is currently a candidate for Fifth District supervisor.
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