by Philip J. Cunningham
It’s official. US President Barack Obama, long suspected of being the type of person who wanted to have his cake and eat it too, wine and dine with Wall Street while tossing rhetorical crumbs to the poor, dispossessed and hungry, all the while hobnobbing with the rich and famous and amassing draconic executive privilege, has, in his Nobel speech, just proved himself to be the world’s biggest phony.
The two-faced master of the mellow sound-bite has just outdone himself in trying to convince a jaded world that war is peace, that imperialism is liberation, that down is up and two plus two equals five. Even at this most international of events, in a world that desperately needs some leaders willing to look beyond the narrow self-interests of the nation state, he preaches America the good, America the beautiful, America the just. Music to the ears of a stateside schoolchild or your died-in-the-wool Yankee xenophobe, perhaps, but hardly cosmopolitan in spirit.
Rather, his speech is mean-spirited. He goes out of his way, and beyond the bounds of decency, in his effort to show that war is necessary and American warfare is especially just. His argument is lame and conflicted. He says war’s been around for a long time so, hey, get used to it. If he was making a speech in favor of legalization prostitution or opium, there might be some point in making the “oldest profession” kind of argument, but surely that flimsy line of thinking has no place coming from a man who has unique and unparalleled access to the world’s most deadly nuclear arsenal. Surely that pale logic doesn’t justify a war, any war, the war of the moment, the Af-Pak War of Obama’s design, just because there have been wars in the past.
Obama gets shockingly narrow and parochial at times, saying in effect that America is good and anyone who opposes America is bad. He pins war crimes on the other guys, but doesn’t begin to address war crimes of his own nation. Suspicion of American is not justified, it’s “reflexive.”
The weirdest thing about Obama, in contrast to other presidents, is that he has been granted a war criminal gets out of-jail-free card, not so much by cronies in the Party machine that put him up for election, much as Bush and Cheney escaped impeachment and trial for war crimes because of their domestic base, but because the US public gives Obama a benefit of the doubt that was never extended to his supposed polar opposite, man of war, G W Bush.
It’s true that Obama’s presidency is historic for breaking the race barrier, it’s refreshing to see a biracial president in the company of his African American wife. But those who break such barriers, in the name of us all, and generally to the benefit of society as a whole, like peasant turned emperor Mao Zedong, are not perfect and do not get a free pass to commit other crimes just because they are on the right side of a protracted struggle.
The acceptance speech he gave for an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize had some built-in hedging, anticipating, and perhaps responding to Arianna Huffington’s observation that there’s a certain irony in a war president getting the peace prize. But then again, the Nobel Prizes have always been quirky, if not a bit kooky, outside the science awards at least; awarding the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger being a case in point.
Obama’s speech, like much of his political life, tries to have it both ways. It’s his bifocal vision that makes him interesting to listen to, until you realize he’s utterly lacking in meaningful convictions, and is instead forever tacking left or right as the opportunity of the moment demands. If there is an internal moral compass at work, the needle jerks around a lot.
Why, one only need to look at the text of his speech to see a flim-flam man all over the place. War is not glorious, but warriors are. America’s wars are morally justified, others are not. He respects Gandhi and King, but he’s loves NATO and the US Army too. He lauds “humanitarian” armed intervention of the sort that helped tear the once-solid nation of Yugoslavia asunder, but would not for a moment forgive Alaskans, or Americans anywhere else, if they wanted to secede or seek independence, especially with foreign military assistance.
It’s a one-way street, all over again.
Obama bemoans inevitable civilian casualties, yet posits the US as the standard bearer of just war, even though hundreds of civilians have already been killed on his watch. If his predecessor made an ass of America, the main difference is that he's giving a superficially more dignified performance; call it a donkey instead.
Obama shrewdly, if not a bit oddly, acknowledges the cruelty of the Crusades, which conveniently took place some seven hundred years before America was even founded, but he glosses over more obvious, more relevant and more recent lessons in man’s inhumanity to man. He eschews in particular poignant, tragic examples of the American Man’s inhumanity to man, such as the Vietnam War, in which several million Vietnamese were killed because “the men” in the Beltway couldn’t get their act together, playing hot potato with an unpopular, unnecessary war.
It’s true that a handful of terrorists with outsized rage have and can inflict horrible terror on innocents. It’s also true that take-no-prisoners, spare-no-one-in-the-way approach immortalized in all its deadly valor by famous American generals, --Curtis Le May is perhaps the most egregious example—but it’s a tradition that goes back at least to the time of General Sherman and up to General Westmoreland, if not more recently in the US occupation of Iraq.
Obama opines that a handful of bad men can murder innocents due to modern technology. This has been true for a long time. Robert MacNamara, a wartime Secretary of Defense in a position to understand such things, admitted that Le May, and a handful of technocrats and yes-men around him, single-handedly ordered the murder of 100,000 Tokyo civilians in a single evening by ordering B-29s to fly low and light the city on fire.
Forget the Crusades. What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
These two cities, rebuilt from almost total, almost instantaneous destruction, extended invitations that were demurely snubbed by Obama during his recent lackluster Asian junket. Apparently he’s not in the mood to think too hard about peace these days.
The US Commander-in-Chief chides nations for pursuing nuclear weapons, something his nation possesses in spades, and he chillingly speaks, with the power of a terror-inflicting arsenal at his command, of “accountability” for others. And just who is America accountable to?
The arrogant unilateralism of the Bush years rolls on.
Still, one must credit Obama for being at least being self-aware, especially in contrast to the equally narcissistic but considerably more ham-fisted Bush, his predecessor as White House resident decider-in-chief.
Obama is, after all, nothing, if not self-invented, nothing, if not deeply reflective, which is what makes him such a charming writer. He wants to please you, the reader, like a slightly mischievous school-kid who craves teacher’s approval. He wants so badly to be liked, that he’s apt to say very different things to very different people.
His books and school-boyish charm had much to do with his rapid rise as Democratic Party darling. On the one hand, he adopts the “aw shucks” modesty of a man who is not sure he deserves such a prize, knowing full well that being seen as a man of peace conflicts with his day job.
But he’s always been a bit arrogant under the cloak of self-deprecation. Before getting elected he intimated that his victory was our victory, remember “Yes We Can!” Once in power he has been quick to chide critics, mostly through his underlings and the now fraying fraternity of youthful net-savvy supporters, and of late has even been getting up front and personal, as his recent upbraiding of Congressman John Conyers Jr. suggests. Why are you demeaning me? That’s not part of the unspoken deal I thought we had. Being “liberal” means never having to criticize me.
Image management is central to the modern American presidency, why, there’s so much spin and spit and polish and hot air, it makes China’s clumsy, crusty leaders look almost genuine in comparison.
Obama sounds like a man still running for president, he declares war on the hitherto neglected Af-Pak region, but promises troop withdrawals that time nicely with a second bid for the presidency. Like a savvy pol, he knows on which side his bread is buttered, only Americans can elect him, so on this most international of all nights in Oslo, he plays not so much the immediate audience, as to the distant electorate.
He behaves as if he’s in debt to the Democratic Party and supporters who put their money where their mouth was, such as John Roos, Ambassador to Japan, whose previous political experience can be summed up as “generous contributor to the Obama campaign.”
It’s almost obligatory these days to describe the US president as “eloquent” even when he’s not, such as during his recent Asian junket which was much ado about nothing in word and deed.
But words can kill, and Barack Obama’s Nobel speech is a dangerous inasmuch as he’s devilishly good with language. His words serve as a green light to a new deadly war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s not that he cried “fire” in a crowded movie theatre so much as he’s tossing lit matches --incendiary words in favor of violence-- into a tinderbox that threatens to send the world on fire, tumbling down a slope of greater chaos. He’s giving a thumbs up to dropping bombs down from above, putting more boots on the ground, in a war likely to lead to yet more war, all the while wrapping it up and casting it in the most glowing boilerplate rhetoric available.
In making his case for war, he employs, without apparent irony, emotive words such as love, peace, justice, and even the theologian’s “oughtness.” He pulls out all stops, and drops all pretense of modesty, speaking of his work “here on earth.”
He’s not just sounding Orwellian, he’s sounding alien and strange.
Earth calling Obama: Where’s the man you said you were?
Friday, December 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
BARACK OBAMA DOES TOKYO
by Philip J Cunningham
President Obama’s Tokyo speech, delivered on November 14, 2009 at a glittering downtown Tokyo concert hall, gave a select audience the chance to savor the US president’s trademark rhetoric, read aloud in familiar endearing tones, accompanied by slightly jarring Janus-like sideward glances, eyes darting back and forth between twin teleprompters.
Designed to set an upbeat tone for the president’s Asia trip, it fell short of his much-hailed Cairo speech as paean to international amity, but served to convince East Asia, despite the late date of his visit, and two distracting wars on the other side of the continent, that the Pacific is somehow the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The pep talk might as well have been subtitled, “America still rules the Pacific.”
The best, if not the most sincere of the many tasty sound-bites offered up in his Yankee-will-not-go-home speech came early, almost haiku-like in brevity, befitting the recollection of a childhood memory. During a visit to the Amida Buddha in Kamakura with his mother, he was distracted by the green tea ice cream.
Thereafter the speech shifts to protocol-laden niceties about the Emperor and warm hospitality of Japan, the usual bromides to reassure his hosts, even though preparations for the visit were marred by serious disagreement about US bases in Okinawa, Futenma in particular, and the pomp and circumstance had to be trimmed due to the president’s arriving a day late and the host prime minister departing a day early.
Despite looming tensions and policy disagreements, President Obama’s speech soon had the select audience in Suntory Hall almost drunk with good cheer, so much so that he could tell the star-struck listeners, who, judging from the applause, were more than willing to suspend belief in order to enjoy the show, allowing him to say things like “support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America,” without a hint of humility.
In such a sumptuous symphonic hall, with a golden voice delivering gilded words about an imagined America filled the to the brim with good will and good ideas and high ideals, it would be a rude intrusion of the reality-based world to consider US involvement in torture, bombing, renditions, spying, war crimes, Guantanamo prison and the AfPak aerial bombing campaign
Still, sometimes the word master’s poetic rhetoric leaned too heavily towards euphemism, even for Japanese tastes. When it came to describing America’s war against Japan, the president seemed to be whitewashing history when he summed up the long bloody war’s end with the trite phrase, “After the guns went silent.”
Went silent? What an evasive way to describe the big bang at the war’s end, when the US dropped two nuclear bombs, killing over one hundred thousand hapless civilians! The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the bad luck to live in cities that had been left untouched by conventional bombing which put them on the short list of as-yet-unbombed cities suitable for testing the effects of the terrible nuclear device under almost clinical conditions.
If Obama knew Japan better, instead of appointing as ambassador a political donor who had not managed to visit the country even once before moving into the embassy where Douglas MacArthur famously welcomed the defeated Emperor with a handshake and stiff photo op, he might have realized that the Japanese public, far from wanting more of the status quo, just resoundingly rejected the so-called "sense of purpose that has guided ties with the Japanese people for nearly fifty years."
Memo to Obama foreign policy team: the LPD, and its long, corrupt symbiotic relationship with Washington is history now.
And if Obama had selected an ambassador who could speak a bit of the language and had experienced daily life in Japan as an ordinary "gaijin," he might not have held Japan's racialist society up as exemplar of human rights. Japan is a land where long-term residents of Korean and Chinese descent as well as native Burakumin still suffer as second-class citizens, where housing discrimination is legal, where age and sex discrimination are rampant and where discrimination against non-Japanese is enshrined in law.
"In Prague," Obama goes on to say, “I affirmed America's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons,” followed by a boastful caveat. “Let me be clear: so long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent.”
Obama wants to disarm and keep his weapons too. Yet somehow it doesn’t sound right for the commander-in-chief in charge of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal to lecture others on the disarmament issue, especially in Japan of all countries, where the stealthy storing and transport of US nuclear weapons has been a bitter point of contention.
If nuclear weapons are, as Obama claims, "a strong and effective nuclear deterrent" it does not necessarily follow that "those without them have the responsibility to forsake them."
He cites Japan as a country that pleases America for not having pursued nuclear capability, (though it clearly has latent capability) but it is pre-modern Japan that offers the most telling insight here. In a realm once ruled by the swagger of steely samurai, ordinary citizens were banned from carrying swords, keeping the peace, albeit in an extremely undemocratic, top-down fashion. Then, as now, those who wield the most destructive weapons get a free pass. Non-proliferation regulations, it seems, are for those without the bomb, not those with it.
Barack Obama peppered his speech with references to his diverse heritage, including mention of his half-sister and his brother-in-law. Suitable subject matter for a book, in fact a very good book, but what in the world does his gnarled family tree have to do with US policy? Is he trying to say the Asia-related factoids about his life, which he tends to brush under the rug when dealing with the black-white dichotomy back home, have some kind of essentialist bearing on US-Asia relations?
Tiger Woods, a man of comparably rich ethnic heritage, doesn't wear ethnicity on his sleeve in the same way, nor would it advance his golf game if he did. Does this tireless posturing, cherry-picking of his own biography and playing to the crowd make Barack Obama a better commander-in-chief? A Pacific leader?
This incessant desire to please has obvious utility during a political campaign, but once power is secured, it can produce deadly results, if, for example, hawks in the Pentagon have his ear, or certain hard-boiled constituencies give him bad advice.
The problem with the silver-tongued superstar storyteller formally known as Barry Obama is that he can spin a great yarn, as good a yarn as any politician in memory, and mesmerize people without actually accomplishing very much.
(a version of this article appears in the Bangkok Post)
President Obama’s Tokyo speech, delivered on November 14, 2009 at a glittering downtown Tokyo concert hall, gave a select audience the chance to savor the US president’s trademark rhetoric, read aloud in familiar endearing tones, accompanied by slightly jarring Janus-like sideward glances, eyes darting back and forth between twin teleprompters.
Designed to set an upbeat tone for the president’s Asia trip, it fell short of his much-hailed Cairo speech as paean to international amity, but served to convince East Asia, despite the late date of his visit, and two distracting wars on the other side of the continent, that the Pacific is somehow the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The pep talk might as well have been subtitled, “America still rules the Pacific.”
The best, if not the most sincere of the many tasty sound-bites offered up in his Yankee-will-not-go-home speech came early, almost haiku-like in brevity, befitting the recollection of a childhood memory. During a visit to the Amida Buddha in Kamakura with his mother, he was distracted by the green tea ice cream.
Thereafter the speech shifts to protocol-laden niceties about the Emperor and warm hospitality of Japan, the usual bromides to reassure his hosts, even though preparations for the visit were marred by serious disagreement about US bases in Okinawa, Futenma in particular, and the pomp and circumstance had to be trimmed due to the president’s arriving a day late and the host prime minister departing a day early.
Despite looming tensions and policy disagreements, President Obama’s speech soon had the select audience in Suntory Hall almost drunk with good cheer, so much so that he could tell the star-struck listeners, who, judging from the applause, were more than willing to suspend belief in order to enjoy the show, allowing him to say things like “support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America,” without a hint of humility.
In such a sumptuous symphonic hall, with a golden voice delivering gilded words about an imagined America filled the to the brim with good will and good ideas and high ideals, it would be a rude intrusion of the reality-based world to consider US involvement in torture, bombing, renditions, spying, war crimes, Guantanamo prison and the AfPak aerial bombing campaign
Still, sometimes the word master’s poetic rhetoric leaned too heavily towards euphemism, even for Japanese tastes. When it came to describing America’s war against Japan, the president seemed to be whitewashing history when he summed up the long bloody war’s end with the trite phrase, “After the guns went silent.”
Went silent? What an evasive way to describe the big bang at the war’s end, when the US dropped two nuclear bombs, killing over one hundred thousand hapless civilians! The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the bad luck to live in cities that had been left untouched by conventional bombing which put them on the short list of as-yet-unbombed cities suitable for testing the effects of the terrible nuclear device under almost clinical conditions.
If Obama knew Japan better, instead of appointing as ambassador a political donor who had not managed to visit the country even once before moving into the embassy where Douglas MacArthur famously welcomed the defeated Emperor with a handshake and stiff photo op, he might have realized that the Japanese public, far from wanting more of the status quo, just resoundingly rejected the so-called "sense of purpose that has guided ties with the Japanese people for nearly fifty years."
Memo to Obama foreign policy team: the LPD, and its long, corrupt symbiotic relationship with Washington is history now.
And if Obama had selected an ambassador who could speak a bit of the language and had experienced daily life in Japan as an ordinary "gaijin," he might not have held Japan's racialist society up as exemplar of human rights. Japan is a land where long-term residents of Korean and Chinese descent as well as native Burakumin still suffer as second-class citizens, where housing discrimination is legal, where age and sex discrimination are rampant and where discrimination against non-Japanese is enshrined in law.
"In Prague," Obama goes on to say, “I affirmed America's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons,” followed by a boastful caveat. “Let me be clear: so long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent.”
Obama wants to disarm and keep his weapons too. Yet somehow it doesn’t sound right for the commander-in-chief in charge of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal to lecture others on the disarmament issue, especially in Japan of all countries, where the stealthy storing and transport of US nuclear weapons has been a bitter point of contention.
If nuclear weapons are, as Obama claims, "a strong and effective nuclear deterrent" it does not necessarily follow that "those without them have the responsibility to forsake them."
He cites Japan as a country that pleases America for not having pursued nuclear capability, (though it clearly has latent capability) but it is pre-modern Japan that offers the most telling insight here. In a realm once ruled by the swagger of steely samurai, ordinary citizens were banned from carrying swords, keeping the peace, albeit in an extremely undemocratic, top-down fashion. Then, as now, those who wield the most destructive weapons get a free pass. Non-proliferation regulations, it seems, are for those without the bomb, not those with it.
Barack Obama peppered his speech with references to his diverse heritage, including mention of his half-sister and his brother-in-law. Suitable subject matter for a book, in fact a very good book, but what in the world does his gnarled family tree have to do with US policy? Is he trying to say the Asia-related factoids about his life, which he tends to brush under the rug when dealing with the black-white dichotomy back home, have some kind of essentialist bearing on US-Asia relations?
Tiger Woods, a man of comparably rich ethnic heritage, doesn't wear ethnicity on his sleeve in the same way, nor would it advance his golf game if he did. Does this tireless posturing, cherry-picking of his own biography and playing to the crowd make Barack Obama a better commander-in-chief? A Pacific leader?
This incessant desire to please has obvious utility during a political campaign, but once power is secured, it can produce deadly results, if, for example, hawks in the Pentagon have his ear, or certain hard-boiled constituencies give him bad advice.
The problem with the silver-tongued superstar storyteller formally known as Barry Obama is that he can spin a great yarn, as good a yarn as any politician in memory, and mesmerize people without actually accomplishing very much.
(a version of this article appears in the Bangkok Post)
Monday, November 16, 2009
Obama speaks of war and peace in Tokyo
(a shorter, newspaper version of this blog post appears as "Obama does Tokyo" in my November 17 post)
by Philip J Cunningham
Obama’s Tokyo speech, delivered on November 14, 2009 at a glittering downtown concert hall, gave a select audience the chance to savor the president’s trademark rhetoric, read aloud in now-familiar tones and cadences, accompanied by slightly jarring Janus-like sideward glances, eyes darting back and forth between twin teleprompters.
Designed to set an upbeat tone for the president’s Asia trip, it fell short of his much-hailed Cairo speech as paean to international amity, but served to convince East Asia, despite the late date of his visit, and two distracting wars on the other side of the continent, that the Pacific is somehow the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The pep talk might as well have been subtitled, “America still rules the Pacific.”
The best, if not the most sincere of the many tasty sound-bites offered up in his Yankee-will-not-go-home speech came early, almost haiku-like in brevity, befitting the recollection of a childhood memory. During a visit to the Amida Buddha in Kamakura with his mother, he was distracted by the green tea ice cream.
Thereafter the speech shifts to protocol-laden niceties about the Emperor and warm hospitality of Japan, the usual bromides to reassure his hosts, even though preparations for the visit were marred by serious disagreement about US bases in Okinawa and the pomp and circumstance had to be trimmed due to the president’s arriving a day late and the host prime minister departing a day early.
Despite looming tensions and policy disagreements, President Obama’s speech soon had the select audience in Suntory Hall almost drunk with good cheer, so much so that he could tell the star-struck listeners, who, judging from the applause, were more than willing to suspend belief in order to enjoy the show, that “support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America,” without a hint of humility.
No need to think about nasty headlines from the reality-based newspaper world detailing US involvement in torture, bombing, renditions, spying, war crimes, Guantanamo and the AfPak aerial bombing campaign, when one instead can soak up, in a sumptuous symphonic hall, a golden voice delivering gilded words about an imagined America filled the to the brim with good will and good ideas and high ideals.
Still, sometimes the word master’s poetic rhetoric leaned too heavily towards euphemism, even for Japanese tastes. When it came to describing America’s war against Japan, the president seemed to be whitewashing history when he summed up the long bloody war’s end with the trite phrase, “After the guns went silent.”
What an evasive way to describe the big bang at the war’s end, when the US dropped two nuclear bombs, killing over one hundred thousand hapless civilians! The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the bad luck to live in cities that had been left untouched by conventional bombing which put them on the short list of as-yet-unbombed cities suitable for testing the effects of the terrible nuclear device under almost clinical conditions.
If Obama knew Japan better, instead of appointing as ambassador a political donor who had not managed to visit the country even once before moving into the embassy where Douglas MacArthur famously welcomed the defeated Emperor with a handshake and stiff photo op, he might have realized that the Japanese public, far from wanting more of the status quo, just resoundingly rejected the so-called "sense of purpose that has guided ties with the Japanese people for nearly fifty years."
Memo to Obama: the LPD, and its long, corrupt symbiotic relationship with Washington is history now.
And if Obama had selected an ambassador who could speak a bit of the language and had experienced daily life in Japan as an ordinary "gaijin," he might not have held Japan's racialist society up as exemplar of human rights. Japan is a land where long-term residents of Korean and Chinese descent as well as native Burakumin still suffer as second-class citizens, where housing discrimination is legal, where age and sex discrimination are rampant and where discrimination against non-Japanese is enshrined in law.
“In Prague,” Obama goes on to say, “I affirmed America's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons,” followed by a boastful caveat. “Let me be clear: so long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent.”
No apparent irony in this Janus-faced announcement by which the commander-in-chief of the only country to have dropped atom bombs on living cities somehow claims the high moral ground when it comes to disarmament.
If nuclear weapons are, as Obama claims, "a strong and effective nuclear deterrent" does it logically follow that "those without them have the responsibility to forsake them?"
He cites Japan as a country that pleases America for not having pursued nuclear capability, when it is an open secret that Japan possesses ample technological means and fissile material, and just needs snap a few pieces into place, to rank as one of the world's top nuclear powers.
But it is pre-modern Japan that offers the most telling insight here. In a realm once ruled by the swagger of steely samurai, ordinary citizens were banned from carrying swords, keeping the peace, albeit in an extremely undemocratic, top-down fashion. Then, as now, those who wield the most destructive weapons get a free pass.
"As I have said before, strengthening the global nonproliferation regime is not about singling out individual nations. It is about all nations living up to their responsibilities. That includes the Islamic Republic of Iran. And it includes North Korea."
A mild contradiction here. He says he's not going to single anyone out, and he goes on to single out the two countries most likely to be targeted by US missiles should tensions arise.
"It is all about nations living up to their responsibilities…”
Responsibility? Why is it a “responsibility” for the US to keep its nuclearized deterrent capacity, while for others “responsibility” means not to seek or covet the kind of arsenal that the US possesses in spades?
Hold the ‘freedom fries,’ pass the ‘responsibility fries.’ Need any ketchup?
If others did as the US does instead of doing as the US leader preaches, the planet would be in big trouble. The US hypocrisy of exceptionalism, even under the genial Obama, extends not only to nuclear weapons but to pollution, carbon footprint and the rapacious consumption of oil and other natural resources.
"Already, the United States has taken more steps to combat climate change in ten months than we have in our recent history"
Oh really? Obama’s accomplishments before becoming President were notably modest, so he knows a thing or two about how to pad a thin resume. When you have little to show for ten months in office you can set the bar really low by comparing yourself to a discredited predecessor.
What’s more surprising, and not at all a departure from Bush’s imperial presidency, is Obama’s disconcerting willingness to continue to employ, and even augment, draconian executive powers while using violence, or the threat of violence, to pursue thorny foreign policy objectives, again, not unlike his predecessor.
“The United States expects to be involved in the discussions that shape the future of this region, and to participate fully in appropriate organizations”
Here the term “expects” like the term “expeditiously” used in reference to sorting out the Okinawa US base issue, is a veiled warning to Japan. Don't even think of leaving the US out of regional groupings, even though US status as an "Asian" nation is a bit of a stretch.
“We are on the brink of economic recovery…We simply cannot return to the same cycles of boom and bust that led us into a global recession.”
Politicians of all stripes like to claim that things are getting better, nothing unusual here, but it's a stretch to suggest can you avoid boom and bust, intrinsic to capitalism, for all time to come.
And what happened to the free market? Obama may not have shilled for Toys R Us as President H W Bush did during his diplomatically inept visit to Japan, but he is disingenuously suggesting that if we can sell you more of our stuff, even while our people buy less of yours, your workers will be happy.
In place of achievement, --the Obama team hasn’t actually done much despite all the hoopla-- we get from the President policy wonk formulations, he’s forever "taking steps" and "moving forward" and "advancing our goals."
In Obama’s Asia, everyone's a partner (though US is and must remain first among equals) and everyone has "responsibilities."
He calls on his partners to share responsibilities, like “rooting out the extremists who slaughter the innocent." In cold foreign policy parlance, the truly objectionable term here is not “slaughter” but "extremists."
Obama and his Pentagon pals have already slaughtered innocents by aerial bombardment in the “AfPak war,” in addition to the mission-not-yet-accomplished Iraq war bequeathed to him by his predecessor. The US remote bombing of impoverished rural locations, whether due to errant targeting, bad intelligence or perhaps even an unspoken cold-hearted willingness to take out an entire wedding party in order to nail a few suspected criminals, might involve slaughter, but don’t call it extreme.
While the US military has begrudgingly, belatedly acknowledged collateral road kill, it will never, ever see itself as "extremist." In other words, what makes the bad guys bad is not killing per se --the US has killed tens of thousands of people in its most recent righteous wars-- but "extremism" --a useful tag for bad guys since "terror” is suffering from word fatigue. To strengthen the metaphor, Obama rhetorically pairs “extremism” with piracy, trafficking, slavery and infectious disease.
If the speech was understandably a bit easy on host Japan, it was a bit too hard on Burma, the admittedly squalid regime that everyone likes to kick, and North Korea, which everyone likes to hate. One suspects an indirect agenda in which Obama is using two of China’s roguish neighbors as proxy targets for complaints he has about China itself but dare not say too loud for fear of offending the communist country that is bailing out and bankrolling America’s broken capitalist system.
"There must be no doubt, as America’s first Pacific President," Obama boldly declares, "I promise you this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world." By what right does the US rule the Pacific? Why must there be no doubt?
The chameleon-like Obama has gotten great mileage out of identity politics that go beyond the racial complexities artfully described in the books he wrote in prelude to his self-promoting campaign. He wants you to believe he's a died-in-the-wool inner city denizen of Chicago, except when he wants to remind you that he is really a laid back guy from Hawaii, and he talks like a disciple of Jeremiah Wright, except when he's doing the Harvard Law school thing.
And it seems he has a relative for every purpose under the sun, --a spunky white grandmother, a tragic African dad, an Indonesian-born sister, and a Canadian brother-in-law of Chinese descent-- all trotted out for political purposes.
But what does his gnarled family tree have to do with US policy? Is he trying to say the Asia-related factoids about his life, which he tends to brush under the rug when dealing with the black-white dichotomy back home, have some kind of essentialist bearing on US-Asia relations?
Tiger Woods, a man of comparably rich ethnic heritage, doesn't wear ethnicity on his sleeve in the same way, nor would it advance his golf game if he did. Does this tireless posturing, cherry-picking of his own biography and playing to the crowd make Barack Obama a better commander-in-chief? A Pacific leader?
This incessant desire to please has obvious utility during a political campaign, but once power is secured, it can produce deadly results, if, for example, hawks in the Pentagon have his ear, or certain hard-boiled constituencies give him bad advice.
The problem with the silver-tongued superstar storyteller formally known as Barry Obama is that he can spin a great yarn, as good a yarn as any politician in memory, and mesmerize people without actually doing very much.
by Philip J Cunningham
Obama’s Tokyo speech, delivered on November 14, 2009 at a glittering downtown concert hall, gave a select audience the chance to savor the president’s trademark rhetoric, read aloud in now-familiar tones and cadences, accompanied by slightly jarring Janus-like sideward glances, eyes darting back and forth between twin teleprompters.
Designed to set an upbeat tone for the president’s Asia trip, it fell short of his much-hailed Cairo speech as paean to international amity, but served to convince East Asia, despite the late date of his visit, and two distracting wars on the other side of the continent, that the Pacific is somehow the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The pep talk might as well have been subtitled, “America still rules the Pacific.”
The best, if not the most sincere of the many tasty sound-bites offered up in his Yankee-will-not-go-home speech came early, almost haiku-like in brevity, befitting the recollection of a childhood memory. During a visit to the Amida Buddha in Kamakura with his mother, he was distracted by the green tea ice cream.
Thereafter the speech shifts to protocol-laden niceties about the Emperor and warm hospitality of Japan, the usual bromides to reassure his hosts, even though preparations for the visit were marred by serious disagreement about US bases in Okinawa and the pomp and circumstance had to be trimmed due to the president’s arriving a day late and the host prime minister departing a day early.
Despite looming tensions and policy disagreements, President Obama’s speech soon had the select audience in Suntory Hall almost drunk with good cheer, so much so that he could tell the star-struck listeners, who, judging from the applause, were more than willing to suspend belief in order to enjoy the show, that “support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America,” without a hint of humility.
No need to think about nasty headlines from the reality-based newspaper world detailing US involvement in torture, bombing, renditions, spying, war crimes, Guantanamo and the AfPak aerial bombing campaign, when one instead can soak up, in a sumptuous symphonic hall, a golden voice delivering gilded words about an imagined America filled the to the brim with good will and good ideas and high ideals.
Still, sometimes the word master’s poetic rhetoric leaned too heavily towards euphemism, even for Japanese tastes. When it came to describing America’s war against Japan, the president seemed to be whitewashing history when he summed up the long bloody war’s end with the trite phrase, “After the guns went silent.”
What an evasive way to describe the big bang at the war’s end, when the US dropped two nuclear bombs, killing over one hundred thousand hapless civilians! The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the bad luck to live in cities that had been left untouched by conventional bombing which put them on the short list of as-yet-unbombed cities suitable for testing the effects of the terrible nuclear device under almost clinical conditions.
If Obama knew Japan better, instead of appointing as ambassador a political donor who had not managed to visit the country even once before moving into the embassy where Douglas MacArthur famously welcomed the defeated Emperor with a handshake and stiff photo op, he might have realized that the Japanese public, far from wanting more of the status quo, just resoundingly rejected the so-called "sense of purpose that has guided ties with the Japanese people for nearly fifty years."
Memo to Obama: the LPD, and its long, corrupt symbiotic relationship with Washington is history now.
And if Obama had selected an ambassador who could speak a bit of the language and had experienced daily life in Japan as an ordinary "gaijin," he might not have held Japan's racialist society up as exemplar of human rights. Japan is a land where long-term residents of Korean and Chinese descent as well as native Burakumin still suffer as second-class citizens, where housing discrimination is legal, where age and sex discrimination are rampant and where discrimination against non-Japanese is enshrined in law.
“In Prague,” Obama goes on to say, “I affirmed America's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons,” followed by a boastful caveat. “Let me be clear: so long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent.”
No apparent irony in this Janus-faced announcement by which the commander-in-chief of the only country to have dropped atom bombs on living cities somehow claims the high moral ground when it comes to disarmament.
If nuclear weapons are, as Obama claims, "a strong and effective nuclear deterrent" does it logically follow that "those without them have the responsibility to forsake them?"
He cites Japan as a country that pleases America for not having pursued nuclear capability, when it is an open secret that Japan possesses ample technological means and fissile material, and just needs snap a few pieces into place, to rank as one of the world's top nuclear powers.
But it is pre-modern Japan that offers the most telling insight here. In a realm once ruled by the swagger of steely samurai, ordinary citizens were banned from carrying swords, keeping the peace, albeit in an extremely undemocratic, top-down fashion. Then, as now, those who wield the most destructive weapons get a free pass.
"As I have said before, strengthening the global nonproliferation regime is not about singling out individual nations. It is about all nations living up to their responsibilities. That includes the Islamic Republic of Iran. And it includes North Korea."
A mild contradiction here. He says he's not going to single anyone out, and he goes on to single out the two countries most likely to be targeted by US missiles should tensions arise.
"It is all about nations living up to their responsibilities…”
Responsibility? Why is it a “responsibility” for the US to keep its nuclearized deterrent capacity, while for others “responsibility” means not to seek or covet the kind of arsenal that the US possesses in spades?
Hold the ‘freedom fries,’ pass the ‘responsibility fries.’ Need any ketchup?
If others did as the US does instead of doing as the US leader preaches, the planet would be in big trouble. The US hypocrisy of exceptionalism, even under the genial Obama, extends not only to nuclear weapons but to pollution, carbon footprint and the rapacious consumption of oil and other natural resources.
"Already, the United States has taken more steps to combat climate change in ten months than we have in our recent history"
Oh really? Obama’s accomplishments before becoming President were notably modest, so he knows a thing or two about how to pad a thin resume. When you have little to show for ten months in office you can set the bar really low by comparing yourself to a discredited predecessor.
What’s more surprising, and not at all a departure from Bush’s imperial presidency, is Obama’s disconcerting willingness to continue to employ, and even augment, draconian executive powers while using violence, or the threat of violence, to pursue thorny foreign policy objectives, again, not unlike his predecessor.
“The United States expects to be involved in the discussions that shape the future of this region, and to participate fully in appropriate organizations”
Here the term “expects” like the term “expeditiously” used in reference to sorting out the Okinawa US base issue, is a veiled warning to Japan. Don't even think of leaving the US out of regional groupings, even though US status as an "Asian" nation is a bit of a stretch.
“We are on the brink of economic recovery…We simply cannot return to the same cycles of boom and bust that led us into a global recession.”
Politicians of all stripes like to claim that things are getting better, nothing unusual here, but it's a stretch to suggest can you avoid boom and bust, intrinsic to capitalism, for all time to come.
And what happened to the free market? Obama may not have shilled for Toys R Us as President H W Bush did during his diplomatically inept visit to Japan, but he is disingenuously suggesting that if we can sell you more of our stuff, even while our people buy less of yours, your workers will be happy.
In place of achievement, --the Obama team hasn’t actually done much despite all the hoopla-- we get from the President policy wonk formulations, he’s forever "taking steps" and "moving forward" and "advancing our goals."
In Obama’s Asia, everyone's a partner (though US is and must remain first among equals) and everyone has "responsibilities."
He calls on his partners to share responsibilities, like “rooting out the extremists who slaughter the innocent." In cold foreign policy parlance, the truly objectionable term here is not “slaughter” but "extremists."
Obama and his Pentagon pals have already slaughtered innocents by aerial bombardment in the “AfPak war,” in addition to the mission-not-yet-accomplished Iraq war bequeathed to him by his predecessor. The US remote bombing of impoverished rural locations, whether due to errant targeting, bad intelligence or perhaps even an unspoken cold-hearted willingness to take out an entire wedding party in order to nail a few suspected criminals, might involve slaughter, but don’t call it extreme.
While the US military has begrudgingly, belatedly acknowledged collateral road kill, it will never, ever see itself as "extremist." In other words, what makes the bad guys bad is not killing per se --the US has killed tens of thousands of people in its most recent righteous wars-- but "extremism" --a useful tag for bad guys since "terror” is suffering from word fatigue. To strengthen the metaphor, Obama rhetorically pairs “extremism” with piracy, trafficking, slavery and infectious disease.
If the speech was understandably a bit easy on host Japan, it was a bit too hard on Burma, the admittedly squalid regime that everyone likes to kick, and North Korea, which everyone likes to hate. One suspects an indirect agenda in which Obama is using two of China’s roguish neighbors as proxy targets for complaints he has about China itself but dare not say too loud for fear of offending the communist country that is bailing out and bankrolling America’s broken capitalist system.
"There must be no doubt, as America’s first Pacific President," Obama boldly declares, "I promise you this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world." By what right does the US rule the Pacific? Why must there be no doubt?
The chameleon-like Obama has gotten great mileage out of identity politics that go beyond the racial complexities artfully described in the books he wrote in prelude to his self-promoting campaign. He wants you to believe he's a died-in-the-wool inner city denizen of Chicago, except when he wants to remind you that he is really a laid back guy from Hawaii, and he talks like a disciple of Jeremiah Wright, except when he's doing the Harvard Law school thing.
And it seems he has a relative for every purpose under the sun, --a spunky white grandmother, a tragic African dad, an Indonesian-born sister, and a Canadian brother-in-law of Chinese descent-- all trotted out for political purposes.
But what does his gnarled family tree have to do with US policy? Is he trying to say the Asia-related factoids about his life, which he tends to brush under the rug when dealing with the black-white dichotomy back home, have some kind of essentialist bearing on US-Asia relations?
Tiger Woods, a man of comparably rich ethnic heritage, doesn't wear ethnicity on his sleeve in the same way, nor would it advance his golf game if he did. Does this tireless posturing, cherry-picking of his own biography and playing to the crowd make Barack Obama a better commander-in-chief? A Pacific leader?
This incessant desire to please has obvious utility during a political campaign, but once power is secured, it can produce deadly results, if, for example, hawks in the Pentagon have his ear, or certain hard-boiled constituencies give him bad advice.
The problem with the silver-tongued superstar storyteller formally known as Barry Obama is that he can spin a great yarn, as good a yarn as any politician in memory, and mesmerize people without actually doing very much.
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