From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

Sen. Barack Obama scored big in the Invesco Stadium last night with an acceptance speech that managed to do everything that the political operatives, pundits and critics had argued he’d have to do: It was at once impassioned, full of actual policy plans, and aggressive in its attack on John McCain, his Republican opponent for the presidency.

But the speech also raises some important questions. Biggest among these was Obama’s continued insistence that he will expand the military and, instead of bringing the troops home from Iraq, will shift at least some of them to Afghanistan where he’s calling for an escalation of a war that seems doomed to failure. The expansion of the military that he is proposing, furthermore, would be unrelated to the Afghanistan conflict, and is of a more long-term nature, suggesting that Obama is envisioning even more future conflicts.

That in itself is disheartening and represents a failure of vision, but it also begs the question of how he can hope to achieve any of his major domestic goals, if he is intent upon increasing the already $600-billion Pentagon budget further. The reality is that he cannot. Until Obama and Democrats acknowledge that the US cannot continue to be the new Rome, with 800 bases scattered around the globe, and with a foreign policy that is based on gunboat diplomacy, any high-minded talk about national health care, universal college education or even pre-K education, or a crash program to combat climate change is simply hot air and wishful thinking.

Perhaps most Democrats and progressives will be willing to ignore this internal contradiction and failure of vision on the part of the Democratic candidate, and will enthusiastically support his campaign. Perhaps many independents too will not dig too hard into the numbers and will go for the softer part of his message—that the country has been misled and divided for eight years and that we need to come together, and that America is “better than” the America of George Bush and John McCain.

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