This week I’m going to rant about some issues that the new Obama administration should, in my humble opinion, address. However, it would be hard to post this without commenting on the Iraq/U.S. status of forces agreement approved on Thursday by the Iraqi parliament. This is, in essence, a timetable for withdrawal, setting an end date for our occupation of Iraq – something Bush repeatedly refused to do, used time and again to bait war opponents as being surrender monkeys, unsupportive of the troops, etc. (“Waving the white flag of surrender” as Sarah Palin put it.) So all of that…. was a lot of hot air again, right? Did you catch that too? Thought so.

Okay, back to the O-man. As I wrote last week, Gaza and the D.R. of Congo are festering sores that should be attended to with all speed. There are many other foreign policy nightmares to dispel, and again, I don’t think I need to mention Iraq and Afghanistan as part of that “short” list. Let’s make the list a little longer:

Russia. One thing that is creeping up on us gradually is the threat of a renewed cold war with Russia. While a McCain presidency would most certainly have been a disaster on this front, we are certainly not out of the woods. Russia has a massive nuclear arsenal, nearly on par with our own. The rising price of oil has helped that country climb out of the economic hole that we helped put them in after the fall of the Soviet Union. The rising distrust they have for us is largely the product of our support for the application in the early 1990s of economic shock therapy and the resulting demographic disaster that took place, our insistence on expanding NATO (what was a hostile military alliance) deep into eastern Europe and right to their borders, our idiotic deployment of the dysfunctional boondoggle known as “missile defense” in Poland and the Czech Republic, and our enthusiasm and funding for creatures like Saakashvili, who started the conflict in Georgia this past spring. Obama could do worse than to reverse this policy before it gets beyond asinine.

Venezuela. Related to the above in terms of manufactured threats, the Bush Administration and many others in Washington – including Democrats – despise Chavez for the simple reason that he cannot be intimidated by them. They tried to remove him in a coup, supported by the U.S. and Britain, which quickly backfired. Now they treat him like a dictator, though in electoral terms he has far more legitimacy than George W. Bush, having prevailed in contested elections and plebiscites a number of times. Our leaders deplore his tendency towards empowering the poor and chipping away at the privileges the traditionally U.S.-oriented elite sectors of Venezuelan society, but what REALLY irks them is his material support for independent development and greater regional integration in Latin America. My guess is that most of Obama’s advisors will be on the same side as Bush’s Latin America team with regard to Chavez, judging by what the O-man has said himself. And now, in true cold war fashion, they are making hay out of his arms purchase from Russia and the presence of Russian war ships in “our” hemisphere.

More to follow next week, but as I’m sure you’re aware, the institutional tendencies towards confrontation run strong and deep in our foreign policy. There will be plenty of opportunities to speak up in the next four years.

luv you,

jp

There’s been a lot of talk in the pundit universe and surrounding blogosphere about cabinet appointments. I suppose that’s the kind of news I should expect to hear between now and January 20, aside from reports on the continuing economic disaster, now rivaling Iraq as Bush’s biggest fuckup ever (if not in lives, certainly in dollars lost). For my own part, I’ll reserve judgment until more of the Obama administration is in place. I’d like to spend this longish constitutional intermission between election day and inauguration day talking about the issues that I think should be a priority for the new regime. Not that they will listen, but… here it comes, Mr. President-Elect.

This week, foreign policy.

The Congo War. This is the deadliest conflict since World War II (unless, perhaps, you roll all of the Indochina wars together), and it has gotten very little attention in our national media. This is pretty typical treatment for sub-Saharan Africa, but honestly… more than 5 million people have died over the past 10 years, and it’s still going. The war is often portrayed as impossibly complex and abstruse, but at its root are some very comprehensible motivations. The D.R. of Congo is a Western Europe-sized treasure house of mineral wealth, holding most of the world’s cobalt, as well as massive deposits of coltan and other materials necessary for the maintenance of our 21st-Century technology-obsessed consumer lifestyles. Whoever is doing the actually killing and mass rape at any given time – renegade Rwandan generals or Congolese government troops – these minerals continue to flow into our insatiable industrial economies, just as they did during Mobutu’s and King Leopold’s times. Seems to me that Obama’s foreign policy team could do worse than to make this war a priority, even if it isn’t costing U.S. lives. They could start by dropping the idiotic idea of creating an Africa Command for our military and taking a good hard look at U.S. companies – like Freeport McMoran – who do business in the Congo.

Israel – Palestine. The conflict in Israel-Palestine has run through eleven presidencies without resolution. Will Obama’s be the twelfth? I’m not sanguine about the prospects for an equitable resolution with Rahm Emmanuel, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk at the O-man’s ear. One can only hope that the President-Elect is smart enough and compassionate enough to recognize that what the Israeli government is doing right now, particularly in Gaza, constitutes a serious crime against humanity. There is only one obvious solution to this conflict and it’s based on the pre-June 1967 borders. Everyone knows this to be true, but we are frozen in the stalemate established by Nixon, Kissinger, and the Israeli government more than three decades ago. At the very least, Obama needs to apply some pressure to Tel Aviv to take the thumb screws off of those many thousands of families struggling to survive in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison. Something like this can only happen if people across our nation make their voices heard in support of that imprisoned population.

I’ve got more, but I’ll stop. Obama’s got a lot on his plate right now – don’t want to burn the guy out this early. Tune in next week, Barack-o. I’m just getting warmed up.

luv u,

jp