"Change We Can Believe In"?

See below Obama's remarks, excerpted, before AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) on June 4, 2008, his first major remarks after wrapping up enough pledged delegates to secure the Democratic Party nomination.

For those who continue to hope that Obama can be believed when he promises "change," note what kind of change he means.

Obama makes indisputably clear below (after all, he was auditioning before AIPAC) that he accepts in their entirety the Bush White House's fraudulent claims that Iran is building a nuclear program, that this constitutes a justification for military attack upon Iran, that Israel's attack on Syria's alleged nuclear facility was fully justified, and that Iran's military constitutes a terrorist organization.

Where in any of this is there any glimmer of a difference between Obama's views and that of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, John McCain, or George W. Bush, except the color of Obama's skin, and the fact that Obama can write books?

Where in any of this can one find an acknowledgment that, according to international law, attacking another country that has not attacked us - or Israel for that matter - constitutes the gravest war crime of all?

In 1946, in Nuremberg, an American Judge wrote: 'To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.'

(Dahr Jamail, "The 'Free Fire Zone' of Iraq," p. 76, in Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney. The quote from the American Judge comes from Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals—Nuremberg, Germany 1946.)

Claiming that another country poses a threat to you, or that it pursues - Bush claims that even the knowledge of how to make a nuke is verboten for the Iranians - or possesses WMD, therefore represents nothing but the sabre rattling that precedes the commission of war crimes.

Obama: "That is the change we need in our foreign policy. Change that restores American power and influence."

This is as clearly and cogently as anyone can state it. What Obama means by change is that which "restores American power and influence."

His problem with Bush and Cheney, as he has repeatedly stated as a senator and presidential candidate, isn't that they launched an unjust, illegal and immoral war on Iraq.

His problem is that they have done things to harm "American power and influence."

What is the actual content of that power and influence? What does Obama mean by that?

He makes this crystal clear: he supports military attacks on countries that pose no real threat to us in order to "restore American power and influence."

Obama is preparing American and Israeli public opinion for more war crimes committed upon people who have done us no harm.

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