Hugh O’Shaughnessy argues that he may be a huge improvement on his predecessor, but Britain should not allow Barack Obama to draw us into any more catastrophic military adventures
MUCH of the world is beginning to be wary of Barack Obama, notably over his attitude to the Middle East. Those who felt the election to the White House of a man of mixed race – not black, please, let’s not disrespect his long-suffering white mother – would automatically waft the United States onto a new plane of peace and justice where butter would refuse to melt in the mouth of the new incumbent are now having to acknowledge their naivety.
Nevertheless, Obama’s speech to US marines on February 27 showed he does want to rein in the war in Iraq. There are signs, too, that he may try and persuade his country out of the mantrap it got itself into over Iran, blaming the Iranians for their criminal stupidity in seizing the diplomats at the US embassy in Tehran while refusing to recognise the immense damage the Americans did by supporting the revolting Shah Pahlavi and backing his bestial secret police.
As far as the exit from Iraq is concerned, perhaps there are those in Obama’s retinue who realise there are Iraqis – heirs to 10,000 years of history – who are increasingly upset with the presence of an army from a country established in 1776 which invaded theirs citing a platform of lies. That army, 4,252 of whom have themselves been killed, was responsible for enormous casualties: more than a million dead, according to The Lancet whose careful computations are routinely ignored by the BBC and other Western media. The invaders also ransacked Iraqi museums and monuments and built a helicopter pad on the site of Ur, the birthplace of Western civilisation.
Perhaps the Obama administration can image how Washingtonians – at least white Washingtonians – might feel if some Iraqi soldiers, unable to speak a word of English, set up roadblocks in their city, shot a few drivers and sent others off for torture in Mexico while their comrades lounged in the ruins of the National Gallery of Art in Pennsylvania Avenue among the bullet-marked portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
But Obama has had to move carefully on Iraq. In deference to the delicate flower of US nationalism – which has to be protected lest it perish and thus plunge a racially divided country, already stressed by financial crisis, into a full-scale nervous breakdown – he must avoid the word “defeat” and retreat into euphemism.
Nor does he have the authority to go against the wishes of what Dwight Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” and honour his promise to bring the troops back rapidly. Remembering his generals and his foolish guarantees to the Israeli lobby and their allies, Hillary and Bill Clinton, some 50,000 are to be left in Iraq – many more than are needed to carry out the supposed task of training Baghdad’s own forces. Perhaps they are there to ensure Iraq does eventually cede to the demands of US oil companies for access to its main wealth, oil and gas.
Now, however, the new President is committing himself to a new Iraq-style operation in Afghanistan and trying to persuade other governments to support US plans.
There are 50,000 troops that make up the bizarrely named International Security Assistance Force, which is run by the Pentagon through Nato. The flaky ISAF does not know what it is supposed to do, so it is not doing it at all well. No one can find and kill Osama bin Laden. The Taliban are gaining ground and winning hearts and minds – not least because the occupiers are killing so many Afghan civilians. Meanwhile, illegal attacks by US drones on Pakistani territory are fanning Muslim unrest from Senegal to Indonesia.
As the Pentagon gears itself up to seek aid, its documents show that its public relations staff are told to emphasise how it backs the Afghan government – at time when Washington is advertising its intention to discard its leader, Hamid Kharzai, for being useless and corrupt. The US must try to get people to believe that venerable institution “the international community” is eager to help. A veil is drawn over the fact that Jordan does not want to be publicly identified as an ISAF member and Switzerland quit the organisation a year ago.
ISAF makes much of the fact that Afghanistan is almost a “failed state”, so should be easily controllable. Yet it conveniently forgets that in 1993, having lost 18 men in the Black Hawk Down disaster, US forces fled from Somalia, another “failed state”, while the Ethiopians, whom the Americans pushed to invade Somalia two years ago and take their place, are already turning tail. Nor does ISAF talk much of Western reverses in Lebanon, regarded as another “failed state”. There, in 1983 massive bomb blasts killed hundreds of US and French soldiers and the survivors soon pulled out.
US eagerness to push the influence of Nato as far to the east of the Atlantic Ocean as it can in order as to get up the noses of the Russians has meant that, far from reaching any ocean, ISAF and Nato are in danger of being cut off from their supplies in a landlocked country of difficult access. To understand the danger Western forces are in, their generals might do well to study the history of Stalingrad in the Second World War.
Some contemporary equivalents of Dr Strangelove are trying to impose the mad US dream of a successful “war on drugs” by shooting on sight civilians seen to be cultivating Afghanistan’s main profitable crop, opium poppies.
General John Craddock, the leading Nato commander, said in January it was “no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective”.
Thankfully, he was disciplined by his superiors. But Britain cannot rely on Obama always taking good decisions in the latest Afghan war – quite the contrary. He seems intent on creating his own quagmire in central Asia.
For Britain, the alliance with the US in Afghanistan and this country’s de facto role in backing Israel will mean more international opprobrium for Britain of the sort which has already been generated by quiet support for Benjamin Netanyahu even when the Israeli government was committing crimes against the people of Gaza.
If Gordon Brown is attuned to British public opinion, he will know that he cannot allow this country to be conned into a second US attempt at an impossible military victory or march to the strategies of the Israeli armed forces.
But let us not be too downhearted. A lot of clever people in Germany and elsewhere are working solidly to frame war crimes and torture charges against George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. In the next few months, the charges will be made public. What will the Labour Party do if the International Criminal Court shows an interest in the record of its former leader?
