Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Breathless in Washington
By Tom Engelhardt
Prestowitz, Charlene Barshefsky, C Fred Bergsten, Adam Posen, Robert Kuttner,
Robert Samuelson, Alan Murray, William Bonvillian, Doug and Heidi Rediker,
Bernard Schwartz, Tom Gallagher, Sheila Bair, Sherle Schwenninger, and Kevin
Phillips."
Mobilizing a largely Clintonista brain trust may look reassuring to some - an
in-gathering of all the Washington wisdom available before Hurricane Bush/Dick
Cheney hit town, but unfortunately, we don't happen to be entering a Clinton
3.0 moment. What's globalizing now is American disaster, which threatens to
level a vulnerable world.
In a sense, though, domestic policy may, relatively speaking, represent the
good news of the coming Obama era. We know, for
instance, that those preparing the way for the new president's arrival are
thinking hard about how to roll back the worst of Bush cronyism,
enrich-yourself-at-the-public-troughism, general lawlessness, and
unconstitutionality.
As a start, according to Ceci Connolly and R Jeffrey Smith of the Washington
Post, Obama advisers have already been compiling "a list of about 200 Bush
administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to
reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research,
reproductive rights and other issues", including oil drilling in pristine wild
lands. In addition, Obama's people are evidently at work on ways to close the
Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba and try some of its prisoners in US
courts.
However, if continuity domestically means a rollback to the Clinton era,
continuity in the foreign policy sphere - Guantanamo aside - may be a somewhat
different matter. We won't know the full cast of characters to come until the
president-elect makes the necessary announcements or has a national security
press conference with a similar lineup behind him. But it's certainly rumored
that Robert Gates, a symbol of continuity from both Bush eras, might be kept on
as secretary of defense, or a Republican senator like Richard Lugar of Indiana
or, more interestingly, retiring Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel might be
appointed to the post. Of course, many Clintonistas are sure to be in this
lineup, too.
In addition, among the essential cast of characters will be chairman of the
Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen and Petraeus, both late Bush appointees, both
seemingly flexible military men and interested in a military-plus approach to
the Afghan and Iraq wars. Petraeus, for instance, reportedly recently asked
for, and was denied, permission to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
All these figures will represent a turn away from the particular madness of the
early Bush years abroad, one that actually began in the final years of his
second term. But such a national security lineup is unlikely to include fresh
thinkers who might truly re-imagine an imperial world, or anyone who might
genuinely buck the power of the Pentagon. What Obama looks to have are
custodians and bureaucrats of empire, far more cautious, far more sane, and
certainly far more grown-up than the first-term Bush appointees, but not a cast
of characters fit for reshaping American policy in a new world of disorder and
unraveling economies, not a crew ready to break new ground and cede much old
ground on this still American-garrisoned planet of ours.
Breathless in Washington
Let's assume the best: that Obama truly means to bring some form of the
people's will, as he imagines it, to Washington after eight years of
unconstitutional "commander-in-chief" governance. That - take my word for it -
he can't do without the people themselves expressing that will.
Of course, even in the Bush era, Americans didn't simply cede the public
commons. They turned out, for instance, in staggering numbers to protest the
president's invasion of Iraq before it ever happened, and again more recently
to work tirelessly to elect Obama president. But - so it seems to me - when
immediate goals are either disappointingly not achieved, or achieved relatively
quickly, most Americans tend to pack their bags and head for home, as so many
did in despair after the invasion was launched in 2003, as so many reportedly
are doing again, in a far more celebratory mood, now that Obama is elected.
But hard as his election may have been, that was surely the easy part. He is
now about to enter the hornets' nest. Entrenched interests. Entrenched ideas.
Entrenched ideology. Entrenched profits. Entrenched lobbyists. Entrenched
bureaucrats. Entrenched think-tanks. An entrenched Pentagon and allied
military-industrial complex, both bloated beyond imagining and virtually
untouchable, along with a labyrinthine intelligence system of more than 18
agencies, departments, and offices.
Washington remains an imperial capital. How in the world will Obama truly begin
to change that without you?
In the Bush years, the special interests, lobbyists, pillagers and crony
corporations not only pitched their tents on the public commons, but with the
help of the president's men and women, simply took possession of large chunks
of it. That was called "privatization". Now, as Bush and Co prepare to leave
town in a cloud of catastrophe, the feeding frenzy at the public trough only
seems to grow.
It's a natural reaction - and certainly a commonplace media reaction at the
moment - to want to give Barack Obama a "chance". Back off those critical
comments, people now say. Fair's fair. Give the president-elect a little
"breathing space". After all, the election is barely over, he's not even in
office, he hasn't had his first 100 days, and already the criticism has begun.
But those who say this don't understand Washington - or, in the case of various
media figures and pundits, perhaps understand it all too well.
Political Washington is a conspiracy - in the original sense of the word: "to
breathe the same air." In that sense, there is no air in Washington that isn't
stale enough to choke a president. Send Obama there alone, give him that
"breathing space", don't start demanding the quick ending of wars or anything
else, and you're not doing him, or the American people, any favors. Quite the
opposite, you're consigning him to suffocation.
Leave Obama to them and he'll break your heart. If you do, then blame yourself,
not him; but better than blaming anyone, pitch your own tent on the public
commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington's isn't the only
consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that
we actually are looking for "change we can believe in", which would include a
less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of
defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules
or a bogus "war on terror".
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of
The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial.The
World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire(Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative
history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published.
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