Have you ever had that experience of looking at something everyone thinks is dead brilliant and not understanding what all the fuss is about? Football and Strictly Come Dancing would be two examples for me. It was the same with Barack Obama. In the days just before and just after his election it was if everyone else on earth had joined some cult and I hadn’t been invited. In fact I was scolded by several people who took umbrage at a decision to have Obama on the front cover of Socialist Resistance with the strapline “Palestinian blood on his hands”. One remarked “you couldn’t sell that outside Brixton tube”, something no one had any intention of trying to do.
It did not require any special prophetic powers to work out that if someone get elected as head of state of a huge imperial power with “commander in chief of the armed forces” as part of the job description that there was a fair chance he might go in for a bit of war fighting. While I appreciate that a lot of Obama’s electoral base and people who persuaded themselves that by not being George Bush he might herald a new age of prosperity, demilitarisation and anti-imperialism it was never a plausible thesis. He is really socking to his the anti-war activists who helped get him elected by sending another 30 000 troops to Afghanistan. Since taking office he has doubled the number of United States troops there.
In a marginally more sophisticated version of the September 11 / Iraq / Afghanistan link that Bush used to bang on about he rummaged in his sock drawer for the old united national purpose chestnut: “It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united–bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again. I believe with every fibre of my being that we–as Americans–can still come together behind a common purpose.”
How unexpected was that?
Liam redux 
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