Senator Obama, the Bomb, and the Battle for the Democratic Nomination

[IndianaGreen]

Senator Obama, the Bomb, and the Battle for the Democratic Nomination

By Norman Markowitz
8-08-07, 9:28 am

The press is running with a story in which a few Democratic presidential hopefuls have criticized Senator Obama’s comments that he would not use nuclear weapons against Al Qaeda in Pakistan. Obama has been accused of showing a lack of “experience” in dealing with military matters and “unilaterally” rejecting a military option. It should be more important for progressive people to note that Senator Obama didn’t at all rule out military action against Al Qaeda in Pakistan and also supported continued non-military aid to the country. But there really are other far more important issues here than the obvious point that no one who rejects the use of nuclear weapons as a “military option” in today’s world deserves serious criticism.

The first is a U.S. foreign policy today that turns to military options as a matter of course and seems to think that actions in the post cold war era when the Soviet Union no longer exists don’t have reactions.

Al Qaeda was created in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region in which the CIA and the Pakistani ISI organized tens of thousands of right-wing Muslim Jihadists whom the Reagan and Bush administrations called “freedom fighters” in the 1980s. They fought a counter-revolutionary war against the Communist Party government of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, which had sent the Red Army across the Soviet-Afghan border to save that government from being destroyed by Muslim guerilla fighters already being supported by both the Pakistani military dictatorship and the U.S. Carter administration. Without understanding that historical context one cannot understand the events since September 11.

The conflict between rightist military regimes and religious rightist “insurgents” which tragically characterizes events in many of the countries from South Asia to North Africa is an ongoing tragedy and threat to both progress and peace under any system. The Democratic candidates should be addressing those issues, that is, coming forward with programs to build both a regional peace process and a regional developmental process that help the peoples of the region defeat both the military regimes and the clerical right. If that doesn’t happen, a group like Al Qaeda can regroup somewhere else, as it did when the Bush administration invaded Iraq. It can also take new and different forms in what after all was the country where its leadership and money came from, “Saudi” Arabia, and where a clerically based feudal monarchy still sits in alliance with transnational oil companies over a large chunk of the world’s oil reserves.

Then there is the issue of nuclear weapons itself.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5687/1/277/