Obama's speech in Cairo (transcript) was hailed around the world by virtually everyone, except, as Rachel Maddow noted, for the trogdolite right. So why not have a foreign policy that's actually consistent with its main themes and main thrust, rather than one that continues Bush/Cheney policy with a "kinder, gentler" veneer? In his speech, Obama said:
The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as -- it is as if he has killed all mankind.
Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W Bush has not changed.
Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven "foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said that three children lost their lives....
Eight people died when missiles hit a compound near Mir Ali, an al-Qaeda hub in Pakistan's North Waziristan region. Seven more died when hours later two missiles hit a house in Wana, in South Waziristan. Local officials said the target in Wana was a guest house owned by a pro-Taleban tribesman. One said that as well as three children, the tribesman's relatives were killed in the blast.
And he has continued doing this ever since. All based on a false premise (from his Cairo speech):
Now, make no mistake: We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We see no military -- we seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.
And it never will be the case, so long as we are over there killing yet more innocents. At some level, Obama has to realize that. And yet he spouts this utter nonsense, in the midst of an otherwise brilliant and inspiring speech. There has to be a better way.
We've been tightly-and rightly-focused on the stimulus and the bailout of late. But if Obama's economic moves, reflecting his economic team ("no one could have foreseen...") have been disappointing tilted towards the conventional stupidity that got us into this mess in the first place, that's not the only realm in which this pattern holds true, as was signaled most blatantly by his retention of Bush's Secretary of Defense, Iran/Contra second-string player Robert Gates.
It took less than a week for Obama to start bombing civilians, just like his predecessor. Thankfully, for small favors, Bill Moyers, as LBJ's one-time press secretary, has seen this movie before, up close and personal, and he put on one helluva segment last night directly taking on this ominous step into darkness. His guests included Marilyn Young, whose book, Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 is, for my money, the best single overview of the war ever written, and Pierre Sprey, one of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids" who went on to help found the military reform movement in the last 1970s, and between the two of them they left little doubt of just how disastrous a course of action Obama appears to have set out on.
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