OBAMA'S BELIEF IN U.S. MILITARY HEGEMONY NO BETTER THAN BUSH'S

I don't understand Obama's foreign policy.  Why must the United States send marines to reside in Australia?  The broader question:  why must the U.S. have bases in the Far East, or for that matter, anywhere on foreign soil?

It is clearly a provocative act to the Chinese.  It is belligerent and communicates that the U.S. might resort to starting a war against China because of its predominant economic successes.

Obama is no better than George W. Bush.  Like Bush, he must believe, truly believe, in American hegemony.

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY SHOWS HISTORY OF MEDDLING IN MIDDLE EAST FOR CONTROL OF OIL

James Traub has a review of Rashid Khalidi's Sowing Crisis in today's Sunday Book Review in The New York Times.

Khalidi argues that for at least the last 75 years, the United States has been meddling in Middle East affairs with a goal of establishing a hegemonic control over the oil and wealth of the countries there. The case of Iran is no exception.

Writes Traub:

"Khalidi’s central argument is that the Bush administration’s interventionist posture toward the Middle East is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign. Today’s enemy is terrorism; yesterday’s was Communism. And just as the threat of Communism was wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, so, these days, “the global war on terror is in practice an American war in the Middle East against a largely imaginary set of enemies.” Khalidi’s point is not that American policy toward the Middle East has been consistently hysterical; rather, he says, it has been consistently cynical, exploiting an apocalyptic sense of threat in order to achieve the kind of dominance to which great powers, whatever their rhetoric, aspire."

Khalidi reminds readers that it was the U.S. that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1953 when Mossadegh threatened to nationalize Iran's oil industry. Because of U.S. plotting against Mossadegh, the C.I.A. was able to bring back and install the Shah, a hated figure for many nationalistic Iranians.

Traub writes:

"Most histories of America’s role in the Middle East, like Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy,” focus on the naïveté and misguided idealism of a nation much given to moral crusades. Khalidi looks to interests rather than principles. His story of America’s active role in the Middle East begins in 1933, when the consortium known as Aramco signed an exclusive oil deal with Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. Khalidi reminds us of familiar if squalid acts of American intervention, like the role of the C.I.A. in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, who had championed the nationalization of his country’s oil industry. Khalidi also describes lesser-known ones, including the delivery of “briefcases full of cash” to Lebanon’s pro-Western president Camille Chamoun in order to help Chamoun rig the 1957 parliamentary election."

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY CONDEMNS U.S. HEGEMONIC FOREIGN POLICY

The BBC reports today on criticism by the Archbishop of Canterbury about hegemonic and destructive U.S. foreign policy.

"Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has launched a stinging attack on US policy, comparing it unfavourably with the British Empire . . . ."

"Dr Williams said the US, as the only "global hegemonic power", was trying to accumulate influence and control, rather than territory. But he said: "That is not working," describing the result as "the worst of all worlds".

"He told the magazine the US had lost the moral high ground since the 11 September attacks and needed to take steps including "generous aid" to "the societies that have been ravaged", a "check on the economic exploitation of defeated territories" and a "demilitarisation" of its presence in them in order to recover.

"The US believed that in Iraq it could then leave others to "put it back together", he said."

The Archbishop expresses what any thinking person sees and knows: the United States establishes military bases in any country that allows it, thinks it can solve all problems through military force, and thinks it itself is the greatest and all-knowing country in the world in spite of evidence to the contrary.

This "American exceptionalism" allows the U.S. and government officials to commit the most outrageous violations of human rights, engage in torture and other crimes against individual rights, bomb countries it deems "enemies," and throughout all, encourage its citizens to think that the U.S. is the sole beacon of democracy and freedom