At a recent meeting of the Socialist Resistance editorial board we had a full and frank discussion about the front cover of the current issue. One strand of thinking was that while not politically wrong the cover headline “Obama: Palestinian blood on his hands” was maybe a bit premature since the man had barely got his bum on the presidential seat. The other viewpoint, which is mine and therefore 100% correct, is that the magazine’s principal audience has a fairly good grasp of what American imperialism is and has probably sussed that changing the bloke at the top does not mean a break with all that has gone before.
Today’s edition of the New York Times seems to bear out the predictive power of the Marxist method with its headline “Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas”. The paper notes “In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.”
Then there is the small matter of sending 17 000 troops to Afghanistan. This is in addition to the 36 000 that are already there. As if that were insufficient the New York Times reports that Obama will use a trip to Europe in April to get the Europeans to send more soldiers
According to the United Nations the imperialist troops killed 39% of the 2118 civilians who died in Afghanistan last year. Perhaps as the liberal humanitarian face of imperialism Obama’s calculation is that with another 17 000 pairs of feet on the ground there won’t be as much need for those messy indiscriminate airstrikes that so often make social events in Afghanistan so unforgettable. Quite what the liberal imperialist justification is for indefinite detention and sending people to places where you can get them tortured is not quite so apparent. This side of Obama’s policy has attracted much less coverage than his pledges to prevent US organisations getting up to that sort of thing.
Obama is making a medium term commitment to war in Afghanistan and is exploiting the reservoir of support that he built up among domestic opponents of the Bush administration, many of whom chose to become tactically mute every time he made plain his determination to stay in Afghanistan and we’ll say nothing about his strong pro-Israel attitudes.
The parallels between the Soviet Union’s involvement in Afghanistan and that of the British and Americans are very stark. The Soviets wanted a stable puppet government with armed forces capable of suppressing the internal opposition. The new invaders want the same thing but any fool can see that the Kabul regime is not capable of delivering. What this mean is that the Taliban are going to have another 17 000 targets and all those people who voted for Obama to get rid of Bush and stop the wars are getting a massive kick in the teeth just at the moment when he has enough credit in the bank to make building opposition to his pro-war policies very difficult.
Sometimes you have to confess yourself awestruck by the beautiful simplicity of bourgeois democracy.
Liam redux 
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