United States President Barack Obama’s planned stopover in Australia on March 23 is scheduled to take place around the time of the seventh anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq on March 20.United States President Barack Obama's planned stopover in Australia on March 23 is scheduled to take place around the time of the seventh anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq on March 20.
The visit aims to underscore the close relationship between the world's biggest military superpower and its Australian deputy in the Asia Pacific. It provides an important opportunity to protest the US' (and Australia's) war policies.
The planned visit comes as Obama and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd field rising domestic discontent from dashed hopes and broken promises. In the US, bank bail-outs, housing foreclosures, and the US$3 trillion spent on wars in the Middle East are helping fuel growing disillusion.
Australia may have escaped the worst of the global financial crisis, but Rudd's honeymoon is also over.
In the US, the loopy, far-right Tea Party movement is exploiting the political vacuum. Here, Coalition opposition leader Tony Abbott is experimenting with his own brand of right-wing populism.
Obama supporters make all sorts of excuses for the Democrat administration's failure to deliver. But we can't afford to remain silent out of fear of being accused of fuelling the far-right's fire. To do so would play into the hands of both the far right and the mainstream apologists for futile, criminal wars.
The protests being organised to coincide with Obama's visit will not be the size of those which greeted previous US president George Bush, particularly during his visit to Sydney for APEC in 2007. However, they will still be important.
Attitudes are divided over how to respond to an African American US president who has excelled at playing to the progressive sentiment of millions.
Tariq Ali, the Pakistani-born author and activist, said Bush was projected as the product of a coterie of right-wing fanatics "who hijacked American democracy for policies of unprecedented aggression in the Middle East".
Ali has argued that the ideological euphoria that accompanied Obama's election, and his vow to heal the nation's wounds at home and restore its reputation abroad, has helped maintain this confusion.
He persuasively documents the bipartisanship characterising the US (and Australian) political mainstream in "President of Cant", an article in the January-February edition of New Left Review.
"There has been no fundamental break in foreign policy, as opposed to diplomatic mood music, between Bush I, Clinton and Bush II administrations: there has been none between the Bush and Obama regimes", he said. "The strategic goals and imperatives of the US … remain the same, as do its principal theatres and means of operation."
"If a textbook illustration were needed of the continuity of American foreign policy across administrations, and the futility of so many soft-headed attempts to treat the Bush-Cheney years as exceptional rather than essentially conventional, Obama's conduct has provided it.
"From one end of the Middle East to the other, the only significant material change he has brought is a further escalation of the War on Terror — or 'Evil', as he prefers to call it — with Yemen now being sighted as the next target."
Ali adds that it would be a mistake to think that nothing has changed.
"Substantively, vanishingly little of American imperial domination has altered under Obama. But propagandistically, there has been a significant upgrade."
This partly explains why the widespread global opposition to the wars in the Middle East — which is growing — is not more vocal.
Among NATO countries, the anti-war mood is gathering strength. A January 27 article in The Nation said in Germany, 71% of people oppose the troop escalation. In Britain it was 56% and in France, 82%.
Recently, the Dutch government imploded when it tried to renege on its promise to withdraw its 2160 soldiers. The Left Party (Die Linke) in Germany has been strengthened by its principled stand to withdraw the troops. About 51% of Australians oppose the war in Afghanistan.
In the US, the pro-war propaganda offensive may be having an impact: an Angus Reid Global Monitor poll in February found 54% supported the war in Afghanistan, compared with 49% in December.
It is still true that, for Obama and his generals, war weariness looms large in their political calculations. This could be why the political message has shifted away from Bush's "war without end" to "talks" and "solutions".
The US$250 billion cost of the eight-year war in Afghanistan — roughly $1 million per US soldier — is another major pressure.
While most people around the world want an end to the war, Obama is ramping it up. There is growing evidence to back the Nation article's analysis that the Obama-Pentagon "peace plan for Afghanistan is for more brutal combat with an emphasis on special operations in the belief that the Taliban can be pounded into accepting an American-imposed peace settlement".
Obama has presided over a massive increase in drone bombing attacks on Pakistan. His government is also menacing Iran and turning a blind eye to Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine.
He promised peace but delivered war. His visit to Australia, which will likely include a request for more Australian troops to fight in Afghanistan, is an opportunity to highlight the hypocrisy of these unjust and inhumane wars.
The anti-war movement faces a big challenge turning the widespread, but passive, anti-war sentiment into a more potent political force. Compared with the early years of the Vietnam War, there is a much greater understanding of the role and nature of imperialism.
However, this opposition will remain invisible unless we get out onto the streets.
[Pip Hinman is the national anti-war spokesperson for the Socialist Alliance.]