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By Hamish Ford - posted Friday, 6 January 2012


He came and was adored – for the effortless celebrity charisma, erudite language, gentle delivery and dulcet tones. Yet the President of the USA's much-praised speech to parliament in November was in essence very similar to his predecessor's vastly more controversial address in 2003. In fact, throughout the 27-hour circus of his visit Obama delivered a jarringly blunt message that could be more dangerous for Australia and the region than Bush's cartoon cowboy act.

With Obama, a velvety and seductive glove covers the always-impatient iron fist of empire. He 'remains a popular figure on the international stage', Tony Jones assured us on Lateline, disavowing actual global opinion. Polls now show that in the Middle East the US has on Obama's watch become even more hated than under Bush.

Nothing substantive changed with his historic 2008 victory, nor did the first African-American President promise anything concrete beyond a content-less 'hope'. Increasing Bush's drone attacks on Pakistan days after taking office, despite repeated requests to desist by the elected government, three years later Obama was again being rebuked by foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar for cross-border NATO airstrikes killing 26 people. Earlier this year he sent a secret 'commando unit' (if sent by our enemies, the media would rightly report it as a death squad) into Pakistan – technically invading and potentially starting war with a nuclear power – to carry out an international murder before dumping the body at sea. All such actions are illegal under international law but go unmentioned because they are simply the norm. Despite such brazen acts that would lead to serious condemnation or legal action if performed by anyone else (except Israel), in our Parliament Obama lectured on the importance of having a global system 'where rules are clear and every nation plays by them.'

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Far from playing by global rules or enacting hope, Obama has expanded Bush's worst excesses. He escalated the violence in Afghanistan (2010 was the worst year for civilian deaths), stayed in Iraq, continued the 'rendition' torture program, wrote into law an extension of the draconian Patriot Act, and – despite his having made a rare distinct promise – failed to close Guantanamo Bay, where Julian Assange may yet end up thanks to his own government's shocking abdication of basic responsibility as a result of absolute obsequience to US power. Most controversially at home, Obama presided over the largest public-to-private transfer in history with the big banks bailout, revealing 'the American dream' as socialism for the rich and brutal deregulated hell for everyone else.

The media virtually never mentions that it is Obama's nation, not Hu Jintao's, with military deployed in more than 150 countries and more international bases than anyone in history – probably now over 1,000. We are not 'Caught between two giants' (the now common Australian media cliché) when one has all the guns. The dangerous ratcheting up of the China threat in Australia began with our Mandarin-fluent and presumed 'Sinofile' former Prime Minister's endorsement – against other alternatives – of the 2009 Defence White Paper. Australia would now seek to expand its military, building 12 new submarines ranging as far as the South China Sea. Important strategic and military figures in Beijing and also Canberra were dismayed, fearing Rudd had essentially threatened a new arms race.

Obama's whistlestop visit announcing the Darwin military base housing 2,500 US Marines and myriad war machines heralded more serious escalation. Warning China so forcefully from within our allegedly independent parliament, Obama did much more than talk up the 'special relationship'. Seducing Australia's elected representatives and national media with that photogenic smile, 'the President' did nothing less than rub our noses in the real relationship Australia has with its great 'friend', telling an uncritical outpost of US power it is needed for yet another campaign of containment.

Meanwhile, in a typically folksy Lateline interview Ambassador Jeff Bleich claimed the US merely saw China as a 'partner'. Earlier in the year he rejected with a straight face on Q&A that his nation has an empire. How then to explain Obama and Hillary Clinton gravely intoning 'We are an Asia Pacific power and we are here to stay'? These are the stark utterances of a global empire that has carried out over 120 interventions and invasions of other countries since 1945. Killing Hope is the appropriately un-Obama title of the definitive book recounting this ugly history by former State department insider William Blum.

Be it Obama and Gillard or Clinton and Rudd, 'common values' is the constant refrain justifying Australia's yet further military integration with the greatest power in history. But do we really share or aspire to the values it practises?

Americans enjoy theoretical freedom of speech, but the Supreme Court protects rights for private corporations far beyond those enjoyed by human beings. Since the 1970s real wages have stagnated and in manufacturing areas sharply declined, to the point of starting to be roughly competitive with China. Wealth disparity has skyrocketed, and the country's educational standards lag behind Western Europe and large parts of Asia. Travelling to a major US city (rich in terms of elite private wealth), you see shocking levels of poverty and lack of basic services, while large swathes of the former industrial belt look like the third world.

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Most infamously, instead of a healthcare system the US has an unregulated scam run by big pharmaceutical companies whose generous donations to Obama in 2008 ensure that what most Americans have long wanted remains unoffered: the public system enjoyed everywhere else in the developed world. (Every major political party in the West outside the US would have rejected as far too right wing the 'socialist' plan Obama eventually got through Congress.)

Its endless rhetoric notwithstanding, the USA is arguably the least democratic society and state in the Western world. Run by a clique of corporate interests and increasingly the financial sector, the system offers voters a choice of personality over genuine policy difference. Polls show a sizeable majority of the population disagree fundamentally with both major parties on important issues such as the environment, Israel/Palestine, the Cuba blockade, Iran's right to nuclear power, corporate taxes and the Wall St bailout. Although hardly unfamiliar in Australia and elsewhere, this is 'democracy deficit' of unmatched, epic proportions.

With a massive 80% of the US population saying the country is 'going in the wrong direction', the Occupy movement gives voice to long-brewing anger. Far from 'not standing for anything', its democratic threat of a radical shakeup of the social contract between rulers and ruled – which enjoys twice the public support of the Tea Party – is taken very seriously indeed by those that matter, as seen in the escalating and increasingly orchestrated violence used by police against peaceful protesters. In both cases the only surprise is that it took so long.

Meanwhile, if certainly in crisis at home the USA's international decline is both very real (cutting a lonely figure at the UN on issues like Israel/Palestine) and deceptively exaggerated by serious media commentary. The tendency towards regional cooperation – such as in Latin America, which has enabled the region to free itself from US influence that has bedevilled democratic and economic development since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine – is certainly a crucial and underreported event. However, with a military budget nearly matching the rest of the world combined, the world's sole superpower remains supreme where it really counts.

For the large populations that have felt the wrath of such historically unprecedented power enabled by this exorbitant military force, a very different American is immeasurably more popular and morally respected than any US president. By odd synchronicity, the world-famous public intellectual Noam Chomsky was in Australia just before Obama, speaking to huge crowds and receiving the Sydney Peace Prize as presented by Patrick Dodson. The most quoted living author – not that you'd know it from the virtual mainstream media blackout that greeted his visit – told a starkly different story during his extensive tour than the Obama-friendly one usually drummed into us, arguing that his nation is the largest terrorist force in the world. If, that is, we apply the official definitions of terrorism used by the US State Department.

This charge concerns both 'wholesale' terror – most notably in Indochina where the USA (and Australia) killed millions of people, mostly civilians, almost destroying three entire countries – but also the backing, funding, and encouragement of countless 'retail' terrorist groups and the juntas they install. Those who scoff at such well-documented history should consider that in 1984 the USA became the only country condemned for international terrorism at the International Court of Justice for its actions against Nicaragua. (Needless to say, Washington dismissed the finding out of hand and not only continued but enlarged its violent campaign unabated.)

In his recently updated best-selling book on the topic, Chomsky unambiguously describes the events of September 11, 2001 as an atrocity, before explaining that what the US suffered was essentially what it had been doing to the rest of the world for decades. The results have often been actually far worse, he argues, offering the apposite example of a much less known event in the West, which in Latin America is often called the 'first September 11': when Chile's democratically elected left-wing government lead by Salvador Allende was overthrown in a US-backed military coup in 1973.

'Successful defiance of the Master could be a "virus" that will "spread contagion".' This is Chomsky's description of what he calls the 'Mafia logic' necessitating such typically brutal anti-democratic interference by the US in others' affairs. The key phrases in the quote are taken directly from Henry Kissinger's justification for smashing Chilean democracy and installing Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, which killed thousands and imprisoned countless others without charge over two decades. Chomsky's concluding question should be morally elementary yet is apparently outrageous: Imagine the response if this appalling event was reversed and it happened to us.

Despite all this, unique in joining every American war since Korea, Australia has long been politically and culturally obsessed with the USA. Responding to the embarrassing but time-honoured hoopla surrounding Obama's visit, Mike Carleton suggested in the Sydney Morning Herald that if once it seemed second nature to love America (Fonzie from Happy Days and Paul Stanley from Kiss were my idols when I was eight), thinking people should really grow out of such a childhood crush if they have any grasp on reality.

Even so, while Australians are generally quite pro-American, a mere 3% thought we were not close enough to the US before Obama's visit, with a vast majority saying our future is much more tied to Asia. Yet such is the distain for democracy in matters that possibly pertain to our very survival that the crucial decision to become even more enmeshed in the Godfather's vast empire was not even debated in Parliament.

Rather than a rampant China – or the more unambiguously hated Iran, which has not invaded anyone for centuries (its own democracy, meanwhile, was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1953) – historical precedence is with actual power.

'The United States of America has no stronger ally than Australia', said both Bush and Obama. They were correct. Successive governments have since the 1960s abjectly implored Washington to invest in a base with permanent troops here.

True to the still disavowed violence of the country's origins as a far-flung British colony, Australia's fear of our region and the world is seemingly pathological. Far from expanding the alliance with the greatest and thereby most globally violent power in history, if we were guided by basic moral standards and facts over obsequiousness and fear, a properly adult nation would rip it up.

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About the Author

Hamish Ford is a lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle.

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