MAKING “DEMOCRACY” MORE “DIGESTIBLE”

All of the Big Three Democratic presidential hopefuls (Edwards, Obama, and Hilary Clinton) mouth the standard childish imperial nonsense about democracy promotion as the motive behind the invasion of Iraq and U.S foreign policy in general.

Hilary Clinton, the “candidate of the foreign policy elite,” told The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg that “we want to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible steps”.

Yes, we’ve and our friendly allied freedom-exporters the United Kingdom and Israel have just been giving the Iraqis, the Palestinians, the Lebanese and others an overly large serving of “democracy,” delivered through excessively generous helpings of cluster bombs, Blackhawk Helicopter fire and depleted uranium.

Clinton says that the “loss of Iraq” would be a “catastrophe” for “American interests.” She fails to specify whose “American interests” are most especially advanced by the liberation of Iraqi oil from Iraqi (and potential European and Asian) control of which American socioeconomic cohorts provide most of the troops who die and receive terrible injuries in the great struggle to deepen U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil.

For his part, Obama claims that he has “resisted calls for immediate withdrawal” because of his sense of “responsibility” to the Iraqi people, the majority of whom want the U.S. out and see U.S. forces as a cause of instability and violence.

Obama worries that the Iraq fiasco will “become an excuse of us to ignore misery or human rights violations or genocide” in places like Darfur (Goldberg, p. 33). He does not mention the leading human rights abuser Saudi Arabia, a U.S. friend that happens to possess the largest oil reserves in the world.

His claims are consistent with his recent and terribly misnamed book (“The Audacity of Hope”), where he says that Bush “seek[s] to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun” and says that Iraq was invaded with “the best of intentions.”

Obama scolds American liberals for placing withdrawal from Iraq and the reduction of global AIDS above wiping out “Al Qaeda” and stopping nuclear terrorism as foreign policy priorities.

Obama expresses concern that “failure” in Iraq will encourage the American people, and especially the country’s leftmost citizens, to shrink away from their nation’s essentially noble and humanitarian mission in the world.

It does not enter his mind, perhaps, that many of us have very good reasons to see ending the illegal and imperialist oil invasion of Iraq as critical to reducing the threats posed by extremist Islamic and nuclear terrorism.

Obama also states his disagreement with “left-leaning populists” like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez” who think that developing nations “should resist America’s efforts to expand its hegemony” and “follow their own path to development.”

Such dysfunctional “reject[ion] [of] the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy” will only worsen the situation of the global poor, he says, conveniently ignoring a preponderance of evidence of showing that the imposition of the “free market” corporate-neoliberal “Washington Consensus” has deepened poverty across the world in recent decades

And of course, each of the leading Democrats are strongly pro-Israel, something that will make it more than a little difficult for them to meaningfully advance peace, justice and democracy and reduce the terrorist threat in and from the Middle East. Paul Street @ ZNet

tags: democrats  democracy  right wing  obama  clinton  edwards  

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