Will a President Obama protect Iraqis, Afghanis, Somalis, Pakistanis, etc. from continuing to get into ‘harms way’ of the most potent military force in the history of planet Earth?
One fears not. Even when a fledgling United States of America was not yet a world class militarily power, only a few honest and sensitive Americans like Henry Thoreau wished and tried to protect the Mexicans from falling ‘in harms way’ of a tough expansionist U.S. military.
And as time went on and America’s armed forces approached overtaking the British as number one, it was Mark Twain who led the condemnation of his country putting Filipinos smack 'in harms way.'
What chance to protect anyone anywhere today, even Americans themselves, from future backlashes caused by a wonton and indiscriminate use of a space age military machine that straddles most of the world with its hundreds of overseas bases?
There is no serious attempt to influence an ever-mounting acceptance of acts of revenge and punishment upon the U.S., like that which was accomplished last time through the use of box cutters as the weapon of choice in producing death and destruction in New York and D.C.
No! Homeland Security simply warns Americans that there is more than a 50/50 chance for a future loss of life worse than the 9/11 vengeful strikes against U.S. citizens. The reverse domino falling theory is incongruously thrown up by war hawks with that simple-minded refrain, ‘Killing them over there before we have to kill them here!’ is brilliantly offered as the single hope for domestic protection.
An initial widespread sympathy and solidarity with the victims of 9/11 has been replaced by an ever growing sense that Americans, indifferent to the taking of foreign lives in exercise of a foreign policy that protects inordinately large U.S. corporate profit margins at the expense of majority Mankind, will eventually get what they deserve.
All previous wisdom calling for giving attention to the condition of the half of Mankind living on less than two dollars a day in ‘Pax’ America, wherein resentment is fertilized and recruitment and support for anti-American violence grows, is now rarely heard.
Instead are heard the commercialized battle cries within conglomerate owned media using the very marketable slogan, “The War on Terror!” and a faint echo back from the peace movement in the street and Internet, “Bush is the number one world terrorist!”
Before the world gets a corporate acceptable Barak Obama as its superpower president, it will have to listen to a lot of Obama blustering to counter the other corporate backed candidate’s distinguished record of killing a multitude of Vietnamese during twenty-three bombing runs in disregard of Martin Luther King Jr. calling the war an atrocity and Eisenhower admitting that Ho Chi Minh was a hero who would have been the overwhelming choice of the Vietnamese for president.
For America loves a killer of ‘bad guys’ and Obama is as yet untested in this area of expertise. (At least that is what the war glorifying cartelized media tells us to believe.)