Reflections on race, class, empire, and the first black president.

• Author: Street, Paul
• Position: Remembering Obama

Sometimes you run across an eloquent statement that rings true and false at one and the same time. Look, for example, at the following comment made by the courageous left journalist Allan Nairn in response to the left broadcaster Amy Goodman's request that he provide a brief overview of the Obama administration's first year last January:

Well, I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism, the cultural blow. And he accomplished that on Election Day. That was huge. This is one of the most destructive forces in world history, and by simply--by virtue of becoming president, Obama did it major damage.

But once he became president, by virtue of his actions, just like every US president before him, just like those who ran other great powers, Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off. The President has that power, but he chose not to do so. [1]

There is something very valuable and powerful in this remark, made on Goodman's television show "Democracy Now!" I am referring to the richly ironic way in which Nairn simultaneously acknowledges (A) the historic nature of the fact that a black family now resides in the White House, in the top office of the historically arch-racist US, and (B) the first black president's chilling commitment to that nation's continuing murderous imperial militarism.

This is an important duality to grasp, and Nairn puts it very well. Anyone who doubts that Obama has "kept [the machine] set on kill" should consult the impressive record of murder and mayhem that the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has already built across South Asia and in the Middle East. [2]

Exceeding Bush

Still, I think there are seven key problems with Nairn's declaration [3], which I find insufficiently critical on numerous interrelated levels.

First, "kept the machine set on kill" is probably an understatement. As the left US foreign policy critic Edward S. Herman has noted, Obama has very possibly "exceed[ed George W.] Bush's [global] bullying and power-projection." As Herman explains:

Obama's ... Iraq "withdrawal" is a phony, just as his expansion of the Afghan-Pakistan war is real. His collapse in supposedly pushing for a just settlement in Palestine has been complete.

... The US collaboration in the overthrow of the elected, populist government of Honduras was a throwback to the era of US sponsorship of National Security States in Latin America. Bush could hardly have surpassed Obama's atrocious performance in Haiti, where the US response to their devastating earthquake was almost completely military--a lagged occupation, with minimal food-water-medical-shelter aid, and even obstruction to aid as airports were preempted for the US military occupation forces and the landing of Hillary Clinton.

... Across the globe, US military bases are expanding, not contracting. The encirclement of Russia and steady stream of war games in the Baltic, Caspian, Mediterranean, and Western Pacific areas continue, the closer engagement with Georgia and efforts to bring it into NATO moves ahead, as do plans for placing missiles along Russia's borders and beyond. [4]

It's not a pretty story. Obama ran on ending the Bush "war on terror" police state and has persisted in conducting and defending against legal challenges many if not most of the same repressive and anti-civil libertarian policies he criticized as a candidate. During the campaign, he told his "progressive" supporters he was (basically) antiwar--even though his very underlying promise (to the foreign policy establishment) of continued militarism was evident to trained observers--and then came in to pass a record-setting Pentagon budget and to expand US militarism in South Asia and around the world.

Before he became president

Second, we should not accept the "once he became president" line in Nairn's comment. Obama enlisted as an eager, energetic and eloquent agent and exponent of US military imperialism within and beyond Iraq during his career as a US Senator (2005-2009) and a presidential candidate (2006-2008). His "anti-war" campaign imagery was deeply fraudulent and he acted powerfully on behalf of the "machine set to kill" in his Senate votes and as an influential politician before his election to the imperial presidency. [5]

After the election and prior to his inauguration, moreover, Palestinians and their supporters watched in disgust as the normally wordy President-elect stood nauseatingly mute while Israel and Washington massacred thousands of civilians in the open-air Israeli prison called the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. As Noam Chomsky noted:

To these crimes Obama's response has been silence-unlike, say, the terrorist attack in Mumbai, which he was quick to denounce, along with the "hateful ideology" that lies behind it. In the case of Gaza, his spokespersons hid behind...