Friday, March 20, 2009

Brand Obama: New, Improved, but Really the Same?

My Comment #53.
March 20, 2009 9:30 am

New and Improved but really the Same?

Brand Obama is peddling the same State Department/CIA ideology that has trumped US foreign policy for the past 60 years. Different style, same substance.
Pepsi vs. Coke.

Is the Obama on the White House-generated Nowroz video, the same Obama who promised AIPAC to do whatever it takes to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? Since the US and Israel are both nuclear powers what would motivate Iran NOT to become one?

I don't think Iran and Iranians will buy Obama's line, but Iran will pragmatically play along, because, really, nothing's changed. Iran has its own rapidly shifting internal and regional priorities and challenges and the US has intervened in both, for more than a half-century. Eisenhower warned about the "military industrial complex" developing during his time in the White House. Iran's leaders and their civil society are heeding that warning.

Iran is a proud and ancient world culture, a regional power, a sovereign nation-state that the US has endlessly meddled with, and Iran, like it or not, is shortly to become a full-fledged nuclear power, for both defensive and civil society uses. Suck it up.

The US has to stop playing sanction-wielding Global Cop in every region of the world, and instead the US must focus on trying to shore up its own toppling economic structure, that has had disastrous repercussions on other sovereign-state economies.

The US also needs to come to the table in a spirit of cooperation and join with other nations in combating hunger, homelessness, disease, become a partner in social and economic and political justice.

That would be Change that the rest of us can Believe in.

Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com

— EthicalDemocracy, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, INDIA
Recommended
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In a Video Appeal to Iran, Obama Offers a ‘New Day’
Invoking art, history and “common humanity,” President Obama appealed for a shift away from decades of confrontation.
By ALAN COWELL
Published: March 20, 2009
New York Times copyright
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/Nowruz/
White House public media
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