Essay:When it comes to peace, Barack Obama supporters are kidding themselves

I just moved to an American college town. Nice place. My neighbour has two signs sticking out of his front yard. One says "PEACE," with the name of a local organisation dedicated to promoting peace and non-violent social change. The other is a Barack Obama campaign sign. In a similar vein, today I saw a cute hippie girl (this town is full of them) wearing a t-shirt that said "Obama" with a peace sign in place of the "O."

I imagine that, like in my neighbour's case, and like the cute hippie girl, many of the people who support the values of the peace group--social justice on both a national and international scale an end to war--will be voting for Obama this year. I want to briefly argue that these people are either being intellectually dishonest with themselves or are completely delusional. Because no reasonable person could honestly believe that a Barack Obama administration will bring about any real measure of peace or social justice.

Obama, on several occasions, has made the case that the U.S. should get out of Iraq, and I suppose that would be a step in the right direction, peace-wise. But to the best of my knowledge, he has not announced any plans to dismantle American military bases set up all over the Middle East, in Qatar, Kuwait, Diego Garcia, Turkey, Djibouti, or even the Balad air base north of Baghdad.

Withdrawal from Iraq or no, Obama has also made a firm commitment to ratcheting up the war in Afghanistan, and once proposed bombing al-Qaeda/Taliban bases in Pakistan. This is not a candidate interested in peace, but one interested in ending the fight on one front to in order to bring more forces to bear on another. He has tied this firm commitment to the Afghan war to "getting" Osama bin Laden. He believes that the failure of the Bush administration to bring bin Laden to justice was a major shortcoming. What he has said nothing about, as opposed to "getting" bin Laden, is the role of decades of aggressive American foreign policy in creating the conditions that led to bin Laden in the first place.

For decades, the Americans and the Soviets used the Third World as proxies in their ideological war. For decades the Americans and the Soviets supported oppressive regimes all around the world that led to the emergence of disaffected, frustrated, angry men for whom violent religious ideologies promised something that their states never could. The so-called "war on terror" is reproducing this history--as the above (partial) list of American bases in the Middle East shows. Obama has said nothing that could lead us to believe that the U.S. would even begin to address these sorts of questions under his leadership. Furthermore, at the recent Democratic convention, Obama made it clear that America would continue to support Israel under his leadership. It is extremely difficult to reconcile the actions of the Israeli state--building settlements on occupied territories, destroying the homes of the families of suspected terrorists, building a security wall that isolates thousands from their livelihoods--with the values of "peace" or "social justice."

Finally, one needs only to look at some of the highlights of the foreign policy of the last Democratic administration to understand how dim the prospects for "peace" would be during a Barack Obama presidency: the bombing of Serbia in the name of European human rights (while turning a blind eye to genocide in Rwanda, where the U.S. had little at stake); the launching of cruise missiles against Iraq and Afghanistan; and perhaps most cruelly, the perpetuation of an embargo against Iraq that led directly to the death of some 500 000--that's half a million--children under the age of five ("When asked on US television if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying, [Madeline] Albright replied: 'This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it."' see: "Squeezed to Death," the Guardian, 4 March, 2000.)

Go ahead, vote for Obama--you could do worse. But when it comes to "peace," don't expect much better.