The Imperialist Right Threatens Obama on Iraq

By Gareth Porter

"Robert Kaplan is a throw-back to the late nineteenth century imperialists who believed in the inherent right of the United States to dominate the lesser breeds and believed that the manly art of war is good for civilization. In Imperial Grunts he talked without a trace of irony about the glory of U.S. soldiers taking up "the white man's burden".......

The real point of Kaplan's warning is not what the Iranians will do about Obama. It is what the imperialist right will do about him. They are quite desperate to implicate Obama in the coming debacle in Iraq. They would prefer to have him share the responsibility for the existing policy. If he refuses, however, they evidently feel the need to create a new narrative which says that Obama and the Democrats are enabling Iran to snatch victory from the jaws of the defeat.

Kaplan is clearly hinting that the imperial right, which now controls the White House but McCain's campaign as well, will tag Obama as Iran's candidate in the fall. The further implication of this threat, of course, is that he will also be blamed for having "lost" Iraq to Iran.......

Those U.S.-sponsored elections in 2005, which were so glorified by the Bush administration and the U.S. media, made the Iranian leaders salivate. They opened the door for the Shiite political parties and paramilitary groups created by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war to get state power. The Bush administration had no choice but to play ball with the pro-Iranian Shiites in 2004 and 2005, because it desperately needed the help of their paramilitary forces to help fight off the Sunni insurgents.

Ever since then, the Bush administration and its imperialist right-wing allies have had to deny the obvious reality that the Iraqi regime we were supposedly protecting from Iran was actually a joint U.S.-Iranian condominium.......

The political ploy of shifting blame for the failure of an imperial venture to the other party is an old story in American politics. Remember Henry Kissinger's masterful 1975 set-up of the stab in the back by the Democratic Congress, even as the old Saigon regime was already fleeing in panic? Kaplan is using the threat of yet another round of blame-shifting to blackmail Obama on Iraq.

This is only the first indication of just how ugly this campaign is likely to get on Iraq."