Obama vs. Kennedy

Analyzing the steps taken by the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, is a lot more interesting than doing so for his predecessor.

George W. Bush was easy, simple and linear. Obama, as we shall see, also moves in a straight line. However, on his way down this path he makes various tangential moves that this author has been able to uncover, but unable to analyze with any kind of precision that would permit us a wider and more historical view of this man.

Obama began his administration with a few progressive announcements such as the eradication of torture by the CIA and the closing of Guantanamo. But it has become clear that these were announcements only, not concrete measures, and this is a key part of Obama's management style: a very great ability to make progressive-sounding statements that the dominant media will ecstatically distribute while he, in fact, makes use of conservative measures. Or everything stays as it was.

Who would dare say that the United States no longer practices torture in its crusade against terrorism?

Guantanamo couldn’t be closed due to who-knows-what bureaucratic problems—and that’s how it stands at the present—but the idea of its closure made headlines around the world.

Following these initial pronouncements, Obama’s impetus for showing a different, progressive face cooled. We saw the most pathetic face of the imperial Obama at the end of last year, when the commander-in-chief received the Nobel prize while engaged in an untenable attempt to justify his warlike adventures in Asia. Afterwards, he appeared at the summit in Copenhagen, where he made another demonstration of unilateral arrogance that there’s no need to discuss here.

That’s where the progressive Obama disappeared, only to reappear two weeks ago during the vote on health care.

There we heard statements that we could categorize as class warfare. The dominant players lobbied and threatened others with respect to the government’s proposal and made insistent comments that tried to paint the reform as socialist in nature, and Obama delivered impassioned pleas in defense of his proposal in favor of the most underprotected segments of U.S. society.

These were not insignificant events. Several acts of aggression, related to the health care proposal, were carried out against a few legislators, and there was a very influential conservative media campaign that showed how the Democratic government proposal affected the dominant interests.

In Michigan, the federal police closed in on extreme right-wing militias and arrested nine members of the Hutaree group for its plans to destabilize the country.

According to an FBI communique cited in "The New York Times," those arrested wanted to assassinate several officials and provoke a revolt against the U.S. administration.

Obama’s rise to power had awakened comparisons with John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). Both had been senators, both were charismatic, and both made use of speeches with a progressive bent.

Analyzing Kennedy is as difficult as analyzing Obama, even given the fact that Kennedy gives us a fifty-year advantage.

There is some consensus among conservatives and progressives with respect to certain events that occurred during JFK's administration in the midst of the Cold War and the explosion that was the Cuban Revolution. Kennedy inherited from Dwight Eisenhower a program for an invasion of Cuba that failed in 1961 for various reasons, including JFK’s own reluctance to provide air support for the operation.

I’ve taken the following lines from Carlos Sánchez Hernández, a conservative commentator I found while surfing the web:

“In public and on television, Kennedy took responsibility for the disaster, but, in private, he accused the CIA of having lied to and manipulated him into ordering the invasion.

“From then on, the Cuban exiles plotted against Kennedy, as they considered him a traitor. At the beginning of 1962, the CIA launched a new initiative against Cuba: Operation Mongoose. This included military training and financing so that the Cubans could attempt a new invasion of the island. Before his assassination, Kennedy ordered the closing of the training camps, even though his plans and his personal obsession for getting rid of Castro continued up to his death.

“Kennedy’s relationship with the leadership of the military was equally as bad. Rumors about a possible withdrawal and a policy of non-intervention in Indochina were the last straw for many of the generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who saw, in Kennedy, a man who was weak on the Communists.

“There were rumors that 16,000 U.S. troops were going to be taken out of Vietnam in 1965. There was also talk of more secret pacts with the Soviets, designed to reduce tensions created by the Cold War and the Space Race. They also criticized him for his excessively lukewarm response to Latin American affairs.

“There is another part of the power structure, tightly connected to the military leadership, that also had a poor relationship with Kennedy: the Military-Industrial Complex, an enclave inside the so-called Pentagon System (the system that finances the technological and military R&D that has given the U.S. worldwide technological superiority in every field over the last 50 years). Defense budget cuts that Kennedy projected for 1963 would have cost several weapons manufacturers of billions of dollars in contracts. Such cuts would have affected 50 military installations in the United States and another 20 abroad.”

This conservative line of reasoning is similar to that put forward by the progressive Oliver Stone in his film "JFK" which helps us to understand the motives for taking out the country’s leader in November of 1963.

Personally, I believe that Obama should know that story well. Maybe he does. Maybe it’s for just that reason that, after seeing himself enmeshed in an argument which dealt with questions of profound ideological content and which put him definitively on the side of the progressives, he made a series of ultraconservative moves.

I’m betting that the president didn’t want them to kill him—so he made his first, surprise trip to Afghanistan. From that vantage point he again made clear his commitment to the war and, three days later, we found out that the occupiers were about to launch a new, large-scale operation in the southern city of Kandahar.

The next day came the announcement that the president of the United States was promoting offshore drilling for oil over an area of more than 621,000 square miles. This is a project that Bush had been promoting during his administration and that Obama himself had criticized for its ecological consequences.

Obama may have affected the interests of some of the health insurance providers, but the following week he fortified his alliance with two of the essential pillars of imperial power: the military-industrial complex and the oil industry.

We can’t say that this alliance is anything new. Last November, Obama signed into law a defense bill that authorized the largest expenditure of funds in the entire history of the United States.

But it didn’t stop there. One week after these events, he signed a 30% reduction in his nuclear arsenal together with Russia, and he declared that this would be just the first step in creating a world without nuclear arms, although such a world wouldn’t arrive for decades or centuries.

Did he say it because he feels it and believes it, or because he knows that it will make for good headlines in the newspapers?

At any rate, even if he doesn’t feel it or promote it especially forcefully, it’s a better message than that of Bush’s eternal war.

Keeping these pieces of information in mind, we can discuss some things that are in doubt, and some things of which we can be certain.

What is certain is that Obama won’t end up like Kennedy. These days, it wouldn’t be worth it to make enemies of the CIA nor to put forth measures that would affect the military-industrial complex, such as, for example, ending the occupation of Central Asia.

The doubt that comes up is the same as that expressed above: Is Obama not doing it because he doesn’t want to, or because he doesn’t feel it? Or is he not doing it because he learned the lessons of history?

It’s clear that neither line of reasoning will exonerate him in the eyes of history. Obama commands an empire engaged in two wars, he is politically and militarily responsible for hundreds of murders in Afghanistan and Pakistan—not to mention Iraq—and, given those facts, he should be tried before international tribunals. If only a world with a modicum of dignity existed.

Now there occurs to me another certainty. History shows that you cannot talk about a democracy when it comes to the United States.

We always talk about the military-industrial complex, but I would add the intelligence community to the mix.

Who was the only president, from the time of World War II to today, to make an enemy of the CIA? Kennedy.

How did Kennedy end up?

The military-industrial-intelligence complex at that time put everything in its place and, from then on, no one has dared to deviate an inch inside the system of the United States.

This is the clearest proof that those who govern the United States are not the presidents who make their way into office by majority vote. Rather, those who govern are the powers-that-be in the military-industrial-intelligence complex, and they’re not elected by anyone.

Therefore, we are in the presence of a dictatorship.

One could maintain that the assassination of Kennedy happened fifty years ago and that things have since changed.

In January of 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower—someone who could never be accused of being a Communist—said the following in a farewell speech:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Eisenhower was right and his description of the system is on target, whether we talk of November 22, 1963—when JFK was assassinated—or now. No one has dared challenge that new power that was emerging then, and has continued consolidating its dictatorial power.

Might this dictatorship carry out a coup d’etat like the one in 1963?

Obama is showing—not without contradictions—that he doesn’t seem willing to find out.