When President Barack Obama invited Robert Gates to continue as his Secretary of Defence, it was clear that there was to be a seamless continuation of the Bush/ neo-conservative world view.
Gates had been Bush's choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld, to pursue the neo-conservative strategy of “f[404 Check: was link to http:/ / www. russfound. org/ Enet/ FSD. htm, anchor: ull-spectrum global dominance] ”.
Gates' appointment – and the hard-line free-marketeers, Summers and Geithner, that he chose to head his economics team – are as revealing of Obama's ideological commitments as the fundamentalists appointed as bishops and cardinals are of the determination of the current Pope and his predecessor to stem the tide of liberalisation in the Roman church.
For a while it was possible to believe that the world was going to get a US president who was genuinely capable of thinking beyond the narrow ideological confines of the past fifty years or so.
Now, with his appointment of General Stanley McChrystal to lead US forces in Afghanistan it is clear that Obama operates within a moral and ideological universe that is the same as that of George W. Bush and every bit as repellent and dangerous to the future of humanity.
US Commanding Generals come and go in Iraq and Afghanistan with bewildering frequency, but General Stanley McChrystal is notable because for five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office.
General McChrystal, says Tom Engelhart, 'comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection.' for the ' string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command.'
Obama also seems to be indifferent to the fact that the super-secret force of killers and torturers McChrystal commanded was, in fact, part of a effort by the former Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.
Informed US commentators interpret this appointment as confirmation that Obama is intent on extending US anti-Taliban operations deep into Pakistan. McChrystal it seems, sees 'Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield,' and is a "key advocate... of (President George W. Bush's) plan, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.'
There is an ominous precedent for the strategy of reckless and criminal extension of an unwinnable war against peasant insurgents, and its name is Cambodia.
But Pakistan is not Cambodia: it is not a small and and virtually defenceless country. It is a large, unstable and increasingly angry nuclear power. A Pakistani equivalent to the Khmer Rouge may well be the consequence of this latest example of the wholly misguided reliance on unfettered militarism that has been the disastrous hallmark of American leadership for so many decades. This time though, the consequences may well have nuclear implications and the costs will dwarf those of American leaderships' previous failures, disastrous and cruel though they were.
