Obama's Grand Tour: The American Idoling of Empire?

Just a week before Barack Obama's highly anticipated first tour of Europe and the Middle East as presidential candidate, CNN's Fareed Zakaria asked the Senator about the kinds of experiences that will inform his ability to occupy the most powerful foreign policy position on earth.

"...what is your first memory of a foreign policy event that shaped you, shaped your life?", asked Zakaria. Obama invoked his childhood memories of Indonesia, where his mother worked for the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. And he did so with the poise that will ultimately vanquish the manufactured image of him as the Islamic garb-wearing threat depicted in political cartoons. With facial expressions and body language that made him look like the embodiment of sensitive, flexible yet tough cosmopolitanism, a very pensive and presidential-sounding Obama told Zakaria that he later learned that Indonesia fell victim to "an enormous coup, the military coup in which we learned later that over half-a-million people had probably died."

Most striking, Obama said, was how "the generals in Indonesia or members of Suharto's (who led the coup and ruled Indonesia for over 30 years) family were living in lavish mansions, and the sense that government wasn't always working for the people, but was working for insiders, -- not that that didn't happen in the United States," he added, "but at least the sense that there was a civil society and rules of law that had to be abided by." Obama's interview previewed the kind glamour and intelligence will help CNN reach American Idol in the ratings game while also positioning him to compete in the Great Game of geopolitics.

But as eloquent, smart and unMcCain-like as Obama sounded during the interview, his pre-foreign policy tour paean to U.S. civil society lacked any mention of how of the U.S. government was "working for the people" when its military aid paid for those Indonesian mansions in the late 1960's. Neither did his response to Zakaria mention what the U.S government did to enable one of the worst slaughters of the late 20th century: providing training to 1,200 of those generals and other Indonesian military officers and giving them the money, arms, intelligence and political support that caused catastrophic trauma. As a smart and sensitive boy who played soccer on Jakarta's dusty Haji Ramli Street, Obama surely felt this trauma among his friends and families devastated by state-sponsored terrorism and mass murder.

Nor did Obama mention in his interview the strategies in support of the military coup planned and executed out of the same embassy where his mother worked as an English teacher.

When asked by a reporter in 1990 about dissident lists prepared by the CIA and U.S. State Department and given to the Indonesian military during the coup, Robert J. Martens, a political attaché who worked at the embassy up until the year before Obama's mother did, replied: "It really was a big help to the (Indonesian) army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad."

While it's absurd to expect Obama to account for the violence and militarism of the U.S. government of his childhood, it is imperative that we hold him accountable to stopping the violence and militarism of the government he's preparing to lead as an adult.

As he's mobbed by throngs of Europoliticos anxious to take pictures with the telegenic Senator during his Grand Tour, the Kennedyesque Obama will also be greeted by thousands of cheering Europeans and Middle Easterners, some of whom will embrace him as a prophet of political good, one who hails the end of the Apocalyptically bad foreign policies of George W. Bush. But, as critically important as it is for Obama to deploy his global rock star appeal (he polls better around the world than he does in the U.S.) in the cause of healing the U.S. image abroad, the Camelot factor will go only so far; Simply American Idol-ing -- making large crowds feel like their anti-war, anti-militarism vote actually counts -- Europe, the Middle East and the world will not work for very long on today's very tenuous geopolitical stage. The cheering crowds -- and we -- would be wise to stop for more than a few commercial breaks to ask what Obama's relationship will and should be to the bloody undercurrent running beneath both Bushism and the Indonesia policy of his childhood: U.S. militarism and empire.

Rather than simply view Obama's trip abroad as another photo-op in the American Political Idol narrative offered up by global media companies, we might instead use his visit to Europe and the Middle East as away to start communicating to him -and to the world -that we finally recognize the error of our imperial ways.

Simply voting for and electing Obama will not solve the crisis of the rapidly declining empire hidden behind mainstream media euphemisms like "superpower" or "leader of the free world"; He could simply become the darker-skinned, smarter, friendlier front man for the most massive military empire in history -and we its willing imperial citizens, as indicated by George W. Bush's skyrocketing poll numbers immediately following the Iraq invasion in 2003. Given that numerous polls of world public opinion now tell us that militarism, military occupation and war have leveled love of the U.S. just about everywhere, a timely and critical question to ask Obama during and after his Grand Tour is, "How many of the 737 military bases the Pentagon maintains in over 130 foreign countries on every continent are you willing to close?"

And, given what economists like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz tell us in thick books with startling titles like "The Three Trillion Dollar War" -that militarism is at the center of our growing national and global economic crises (ie; military spending busts budgets and increases debt, war decreases the amount available oil, war spending diminishes money for bridges, schools and health care, etc.) -- we might also add the question, "And how quickly are you going to dismantle those bases?"

As Obama takes his charismatic calls for "change" global, neither he nor we can afford to continue turning a blind eye to the fact that all those bases, all those wars and all that imperial behavior have not just made us less safe in the world -and much poorer; they also unleashed domestic threats to the "civil society and rule of law" that Obama waxed patriotic about during his interview: unilateral decisions to go to war based on lies (lies accepted and repeated by most major institutions), a constitution shredded in the name of "protecting the homeland", criminal corporations protected under cover of "national security" and an increasingly secretive executive branch accountable to no one.

Let us hope that Obama's Grand Tour speeches and interviews signal that his experience is leading him to see how unfettered militarism makes today's U.S. government resemble the Indonesian government circa 1967, the year a more innocent Barack Obama started living and playing in Jakarta.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deserve much of the blame for the militaristic depredations that threaten the country and planet alike. But we ignore at our own risk the vast and well-rooted networks of political, military and economic interests that have long benefited from and enabled the machinations of empire. Our failure to push Obama to attack rather than promote U.S. militarism and empire will most certainly leave us vulnerable to a new era of "change," an era driven by the hydra-headed global dragon of free trade and militarism.

As he visits Europe, more specifically Britain, the former empire that brought us the American Idol TV sensation, Obama might benefit greatly by remembering the words of another British idol, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in the heat of global war said in 1942, "I did not become Prime Minister to liquidate the British Empire." And then Obama might also remember what happened to Churchill just 3 years later, in 1945: he lost the election.

Follow Roberto Lovato on Twitter: www.twitter.com/robvato

Comments

[mheister]

The GOP loves to crow about how Reagan busted the Soviet Union by engaging them in a military spending race they couldn't win. With the current insane levels of military spending, is the US doing the same thing to itself???

[Incredulous]

Dude, you're dreaming in technicolor! America own up to it's Imperial ways? Who are you kidding! Americans don't want to hear about how many coups their country has funded, how many brutal dictators their government has propped up, how many assassinations they've staged, how many innocent civilians have died for American Corporate Interest. Americans have their head in the sand about their government's foreign policies. Does the average American know that Israel is the #1 recipient of American foreign aid, mostly weapons? That Israel's human rights abuses against the Palestinians are actually funded by the American government? Do Americans know that their country armed Saddam Hussein when he was fighting against Iran? That they armed the Taliban when they were fighting the Soviets? The incredible irony, or hypocrisy of your thesis is that Reverend Wright spoke about American responsibility in that now famous clip that's aired on cable news 18,000,000 times.; "The chickens coming home to roost." Everybody knows that he's right. But he was demonized as a lunatic, unpatriotic, a traitor, an angry black man. All because he suggested that America take some responsibility for the past. Taking responsibility was spun as tantamount to treason! And now you think that the history of American Imperialism should lie at the feet of Barack Obama? If that's your game, shouldn't John McCain be taking responsibility for the Holocaust or Hiroshima or something?

[cunuck]

It is highly unlikely that Obama will make any fundamental change to America's militaristic foreign policies.

The following discusses the factors in a much more detailed and conscise way than can be done in a comment. A must watch.

Obama & the Foreign Policy Elite
By TheRealNews.com July 18, 2008

Where does Barack Obama stand relative to the power of the national security establishment in the US?
(Video)
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/071808a.html

[CalliDem]

I don't watch American Idol and I don't vote for American Idol's

PUMA

[charon]

I doubt Obama has the power to deconstruct the Empire. To attempt such a move would invite assassination or other modes of disempowerment. The wealthy have too much invested in the Empire, from money and prestige to power. We probably passed the point of being able to control it in the early 60s, and are now at the mercy of the new imperialists (i.e., the Globalists). We can whine all we want, but the Globalists have set up favorable legal, political, economic, military, and ideological structures that secure their power. It will fall, as all empires must, but will of its own weight, and will bring about a great disorganization and a period of great danger and opportunity. Obama, at best, can limit some of the worst abuses of the Leviathan.

[Incredulous]

Bingo!

[JohnnyBoyyy]

You managed to sum up THE biggest problem facing America and the world today in way less than the 250 words. AND we have some ENORMOUS problems! The fact that this dirty business is not mentioned enough (don't wanna scare tha masses!) is a good reason to add a comment in our emails to Mr. Obama. Forget emailing (or writing a letter) to Mr. McSame - he knows well how it works.

I hope Obama can begin the long path to reduce the increasing corporate and government greed, pandering and arrogance that has really marked the last 16 years (sorry Big Willy - you were a bad boy too!). The rich and powerful "Globalists" depend on the pain and loss of life to fill their hidden bank accounts and feed their sense of entitlement

[leftLibertarian]

America must stop being the World's Police and begin to close down all of its overseas military bases which span from The Netherlands, to Germany and Japan.

Shut them all down!

[Tulka2]

THE SECOND COMING

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

URNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(This poem about fading empire. Obama is the best and full of convection...the first in a very long time here.)

[randomx6]

Please reread the poem - are you calling him the Anti-Christ, the Saviour, or just your personal god?

[Tulka2]

It's not about "anybody". It's about fading Empire. It's about events.

[jackwaddington]

McCain is all hell bent, as best he can, on maintaining the status quo: American superiority; economically, militarily and hopefully politically. Obama, in his cry for change, is not radical enough for REAL change. He will in his own way hanker to also maintain Americas superiority; economically, militarily and hopefully politically. Not that these guys will do it the same way, but each will hanker for the same effect. America is set up that way. It was what the battle for independence and there after constitution was all about and continues to be about. But real change only occurs when the state is on it's knees. If the country comes to it's knees (seemingly imminent), McCain would be total disaster. Obama, depending upon some development of popularity, might, just might, be more adaptable, but not a sure thing. Empire and Imperialism is doomed and irrelevant. But in order to get beyond it would require REAL change. Something America is perhaps not really capable of by it's very make up.

[jackwaddington]

McCain is all hell bent, as best he can, on maintaining the status quo: American superiority; economically, militarily and hopefully politically. Obama, in his cry for change, is not radical enough for REAL change. He will in his own way hanker to also maintain Americas superiority; economically, militarily and hopefully politically. Not that these guys will do it the same way but each will hanker for the same effect. America is set up that way. It was what the battle for independence and there after constitution was all about and consequently perpetuates. But real change only occurs when the state is on it's knees. If the country goes on it's knees (seemingly imminent) McCain would be total disaster. Depending upon some development of popularity, Obama might, just might, be more adaptable, but not a sure thing. Empire and Imperialism is doomed and irrelevant. But in order to get beyond it would require REAL change. Something America is perhaps not really capable of.

[shanedr]

That's a really long winded way of saying Obama needs to treat other nations and peoples with the respect Bush never did while ending the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer here at home. The only one who can answer those issues is of course Barack Obama.

[messy]

There is NO empire, We cannot mend the error of our "imperial ways" if there are no "imperial ways" in the first place.

[Tulka2]

Empire would actually be superior to what we have going on. At least the Romans and Brits tried to impose their laws on the subjected. What we do is promote a few toadies to be good to the oil interests and call it freedom. You think anyone could have won the "election" in Iraq if that person were for nationalzing the oil?

[mjc]

We do have an empire but it is not based on political status as much as it is on economic status today. We used to own the Phillippines basically and the Panama Canal, just examples. Now only our economic clout is really visible. We still have troops in South Korea and in Japan of all places but they are mostly to terrorize any opposition to the American way. We have bases and vital interests in the Middle East and when all 14 bases get built in Iraq you could say we have an empire there in particular.

[AlisonChaynz]

It would be nice to think that Obama has what it takes to begin to dismantle our military empire, but if he can't even stand up against the new FISA law........

What's more likely is that our empire will be ended for us. As with the Soviet Empire, it will be economic collapse that brings the American Empire to it's knees.

Ending our empire, and using the money saved to shore up our economic system was at the heart of Ron Paul's presidential bid, and look how far it got him.

The American people will pay a very heavy price for our collective love of empire. I actually expect a lot of people to die in the social, political, and economic upheaval that is to come in the U.S. - not to mention a significantly lower standard of living for those of us who make it through this dark period.

[Liberoservative]

Good Grief!

Will you get off of FISA? That has become a tired argument that you trolls keep spouting...
it isn't a NEW FISA law... it's the OLD FISA Law with more teeth!

I don't give a rat's arse that the telecoms can't be prosecuted civilly... they can still be prosecuted criminally....

[randomx6]

Oddly, some of us do care. We also find the FISA vote to be a test of character that BO failed. Okay?

[111]

FISA is not the same FISA and with all the information available about what has been done to us that is available, you are being willfully ignorant if you choose to believe otherwise.

and that is Miss Chanz to you! She is certainly no troll.

[freshnotbitter]

You don't mention that the funding of Indonesian despots was tied to the Cold War. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because Japan needed to invade South East Asia (overruning America's Philippine base in the process) after FDR outlawed oil sales to Japan and Japan needed to replace the supply at all costs. I mention this as an explanation of the value of the area.

Would it not be better, instead of attacking the military, to propose peaceful institutions and alliances as a better choice than militarism, in this particular age when economic development on the American model appears to be the object of desire.

Obama will not be elected on the basis of his criticisms of what is going on today. He must convince voters that he has a viable program for change. if no military solution then what ??

[messy]

We don't HAVE an empire, unless you count the Virgin Islands, and what phalanx do we have there?

[antirepublocrat]

By your reasoning, Rome wasn't an empire, either. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt and Herod ruled Palestine. No empire there that I see.

[leftcoastliberal]

No anti-imperialist could ever be crowned emperor, all we Americans can do is try and support leaders who aren't sadistic and insane like the Bush clan and hope that the growing power of global public opinion and social democratic movements eventually checks our rapacious and bloodthirsty rule.

[brainuser]

"And then Obama might also remember what happened to Churchill just 3 years later, in 1945: he lost the election." Despite his WWII performance, wasn't it because of his poor performance as Chancellor of Exchequer before the war that the voters turned him out (pegging the pound too high, for reasons of prestige and causing the UK to suffer much more from the Great Depression) ?

[messy]

Please remember that Churchill stopped being Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1929 (months before the wall street crash) and was out in the wilderness for ten years.

[brainuser]

Thanks. But that's the way I recall it from my international economics course in the 50s. Britain was in a bad way economically after WWI and its recession/­depression was longer than America's, just made worse by America's stockmarket crash. For the sake of brevity, I'll just quote Wilipedia, although I usually use that just for basic facts and dates, not opinions:

"From about 1921, Britain had started a slow economic recovery from the war and the subsequent slump. But in April 1925 the Conservative Chancellor, Winston Churchill, on advice from the Bank of England, restored the Pound Sterling to the gold standard at its prewar exchange rate of 4.86 US dollars. This made the pound convertible to its value in gold, but at a level that made British exports more expensive on world markets. The economic recovery was immediately slowed. To offset the effects of the high exchange rate, the export industries tried to cut costs by lowering workers' wages, provoking the General Strike of May 1926[5].

"The industrial areas of Britain spent the rest of the 1920s in recession, and these industries received little investment or modernisation. Throughout the 1920s unemployment stayed at a steady one million."