Jerry Monaco writes:
>
> The United States has a long standing and bipartisan policy of ignoring
> international law and of committing terrorism and supporting terrorist
> governments and torture regimes. The policy of open terrorism goes back
> at
> least to the period of World War II. It doesn't matter who is in power.
> It
> is a policy that is unquestioned by both Democrats and Republicans.
> Obama,
> Clinton and McCain all support certain aspects of this policy.
============================
"It doesn't matter who is in power" if your gaze is fixed on the leadership
of these parties. But US foreign policy has not gone "unquestioned by both
Democrats and Republicans" if your starting point is the base of each party.
Popular opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq constrained the exercise of imperialist power by both DP and RP administrations. Such opposition, as anarchists and others on the left imagine, did not arise from an abstraction called "the people" but overwhelmingly from that part of the population - predominantly urban, liberal, linked to the trade unions and other progressive organizations - which has been in and around the Democratic party. They've expressed their opposition to foreign wars both electorally and, in more intense periods, in the streets against the fierce hostility of that socially conservative and jingoistic part of the population which supports the Republicans. You had the same configuration of social forces along party lines disputing the policies of the old European empires, which were also alternately governed by conservative and labour/social democratic parties.
I think the potential to restrain US imperialist policy would be enhanced by tens of millions of expectant Democrats emboldened by victory and would be diminished by the advent of another inaccessible Republican administration over which they feel they have no influence. The attributes and declarations of the candidates viewed through the prism of an election campaign is more incidental to the future conduct of US foreign policy.