Foreign Entanglements

by Stephen Fleischman

In this season of farewell addresses and inaugurals, it would be a good time to remember the famous farewell address of George Washington.

Although the advice Washington gave to the fledging nation was “beware of foreign entanglements”, he did not used those particular four words in his farewell address. This may be a shock to many who keep quoting him mistakenly.

But there is no doubt about what he meant.

“The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest,” said George.

Well, it seems by George Washington’s definition, the United States, today, is a slave nation. We have an “habitual hatred” of Iran and an “habitual fondness” for Israel. Couldn’t be clearer.

George went on to say, “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”

Did he mean Israel and the United States? Of course not. Israel didn’t exist then. But maybe old George was prescient? Sounds to me like he’s describing what’s been happening in Gaza the last three weeks.

We certainly have been facilitating Israel’s massacre of the people of Gaza by supplying much of the weaponry they have been using and we’ve been helping them out at the United Nations Security Council.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can pick up a phone and call George W. Bush, and tell him how to vote on a UN resolution, you know this country is still a slave state. Olmert did so order Bush how to vote on a cease-fire resolution on Gaza. Bush obeyed and told Condoleezza Rice, his Secretary of State, to abstain from voting on the very resolution that she helped draft. Now that’s going beyond Chutzpah!

George Washington, in his farewell address, goes on to talk about politicians, those “deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favored nation.” It gives them, he says, “the facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity… a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption or infatuation.”

Was he talking about the Bush Administration or the neo-cons at the Pentagon?

George continues his farewell address with some more advice for us. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.”

How about military connection? George doesn’t say much about that. I would say it is an “entanglement”.

It is estimated that we have about 751 military bases in about 130 countries, not counting those we have in the two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, where presumptive wars rage. No one can quite precisely pin down who the enemy is or tell us what “victory” would consist of but that doesn’t seem to matter as American soldiers continue to die (over 4000, now) and taxpayer dollars flood out at the rate of about $12 billion a month. When asked what the reason for it is, the government should tell us the truth—profits.

War criminals Dick Cheney and George Bush seem to be about to fly the coop scot-free, but they have their albatrosses around their necks and they never know when the occasion might arise when they will come up and bite them.

Perhaps President-Elect Barack Obama needs a strong perfected warning concerning his aggravated criminal liability for any murders committed either by US military forces or by client states after he assumes office on January 20th.

By some counts, Obama is already a war criminal by vice of his actions in the Senate supporting US aggression against Afghanistan and funding for the occupation of Iraq, to mention two. Unless Obama radically changes course on a dime, there will be a qualitative moment, probably on Tuesday the way things are going now, when the first victim is wantonly slain by US forces a moment after he becomes Commander in Chief. The mantle of war criminal will come fluttering down upon his shoulders as he joins his predecessors waiting for the albatross to bite.

The fact that Obama has surrounded himself with such notorious war-mongers as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, and has kept on Bush’s Secretary of War, Robert Gates, shows the overwhelming probability that he will fecklessly disregard any lawful warning, however cogent.

A final piece of advice; perhaps meant for an Obama obeisant to Israel by a prescient George Washington:

“There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.”