This editorial, by Grant Lawrence, was posted to OpEd News, February 27, 2009
President Obama has decided to continue the policy of American Global hegemony. Obama has had a rare opportunity to make a real change in American foreign policy but instead has decided to opt for Bush Lite--a foreign policy a little more palatable but almost as deadly.
Recently the President has asked for $205 billion to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2010. Although the spin in the managed media is that Obama is ending the war in Iraq by 2010. The President will still have close to 50,000 American troops in Iraq after that date.
If you recall, last year Bush had been negotiating a troop withdrawl with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and it called for a deal in which all combat troops would withdraw by 2010.
President Obama has promised to expand the war in Afghanistan and has recently sent another 17,000 troops there. But the Obama Administration is also expanding the war into Pakistan with the recent drone attacks on Pakistani villages.
So Obama's decisions to continue occupying Iraq with a large military presence and military bases for many years to come, to expand the war in Afghanistan, and to extend military attacks into Pakistan is pretty much what you would expect from our former NeoCon Doctrine of Empire.
Also Obama's silence last December and later support for the Israeli war on Gaza was pretty much a NeoLib response to the usual NeoCon support of Israeli atrocities.
So far President Obama has proven that American foreign policy will run a course dictated by the military industrial complex no matter who is President, as many of us suspected before the election.
His recent actions have made him our new "War President" and unfortunately they are a continuation of failed Bush policies. The United States will continue to occupy that region of the world for Oil and strategic positioning but it will be a costly and deadly move. So far it has taken over a trillion dollars, more than a million dead Iraqis, thousands of dead Americans, and tens of thousands of wounded Americans to put some bases in Iraq and set up a puppet government.
How many more lives and at what cost will it take to continue the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Americans voted for change and a President that believed in peace last November. What America got was the NeoLib version of a Neocon vision of empire and global dominance.
America got itself a new War President.
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