[lbo-talk] Obama and Pakistan

abu hartal abuhartal at hotmail.com
Fri Feb 22 09:05:03 PST 2008


The US Commander in Chief has a duty to strike Al Qaeda, a non state terrorist organization whose strength does in fact seem to have grown within Afghanistan itself in desperate need of the economic and political reconstruction for which Obama is alone calling. He also took a lot of flak for calling attention to human rights violations and civilian killings by US troops in Afghanistan. Clinton said not a word.

The US does not have the right to overthrow the government of a sovereign country without diplomatic effort, Security council authorization and imminent threat. Obama alone rejects the Bush doctrine, Clinton has explicitly accepted it in relation to Iran. Obama is not part of "neo con unilateralist and humanist interventionist camps of the US imperium." He is the only one who has distanced himself from it.

Again I am baffled by the refusal to see this.

Abu Hartal

I believe abu hartal is correct, Obama never made inflammatory comments about an outright invasion of Pakistan, he merely said that if Musharraf failed to step up the campaign against Al Qaeda in the mountainous provinces bordering Afghanistan, then the US would conduct strikes of its own, or something like that. Even so... and forgetting for a minute that this would be a flagrant violation of Pakistan's sovereignty, the US' ultimate right and duty to violate other countries' sovereignty being the glue that binds together the neo-con unilateralist and humanitarian interventionist camps of the US imperium... this silly posturing plays into the media and punditocracy conceit that Pakistan is teeming with jihadis, while any non-ideological observer of the scene there will tell you that this is a total falsehood... and it also plays into the notion that the fundamental problem with the Bush regime is its capitulation to "realpolitik," that in fighting the GWOT it is hypocritically collaborating with human rights-violating military dictatorships. Of course Obama's statement was just campaign rhetoric, not an actionable policy, or even one he subscribes to, but in effect what it accomplished was a reinforcing of two neo-con standbys: the world is awash in ultra-dangerous jihadis, and the US must be morally consistent in its treatment of regimes that flout "freedom and democracy" (tm). _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/



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