As Obama Heads to Middle East and Europe, Let's Talk About U.S. Imperialism

Just a week before Barack Obama's highly anticipated first tour of Europe and the Middle East as presidential candidate, CNN's Fareed Zakaria asked the Senator about the kinds of experiences that will inform his ability to occupy the most powerful foreign policy position on earth.

" ... what is your first memory of a foreign policy event that shaped you, shaped your life?" asked Zakaria. Obama invoked his childhood memories of Indonesia, where his mother worked for the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. And he did so with the poise that will ultimately vanquish the manufactured image of him as the Islamic garb-wearing threat depicted in political cartoons. With facial expressions and body language that made him look like the embodiment of sensitive, flexible yet tough cosmopolitanism, a very pensive and presidential-sounding Obama told Zakaria that he later learned that Indonesia fell victim to "an enormous coup, the military coup in which we learned later that over half-a-million people had probably died."

Most striking, Obama said, was how "the generals in Indonesia or members of Suharto's (who led the coup and ruled Indonesia for over 30 years) family were living in lavish mansions, and the sense that government wasn't always working for the people, but was working for insiders, -- not that that didn't happen in the United States," he added, "but at least the sense that there was a civil society and rules of law that had to be abided by." Obama's interview previewed the kind glamour and intelligence will help CNN reach American Idol in the ratings game while also positioning him to compete in the Great Game of geopolitics.

But as eloquent, smart and unMcCain-like as Obama sounded during the interview, his pre-foreign policy tour paean to U.S. civil society lacked any mention of how of the U.S. government was "working for the people" when its military aid paid for those Indonesian mansions in the late 1960's. Neither did his response to Zakaria mention what the U.S government did to enable one of the worst slaughters of the late 20th century: providing training to 1,200 of those generals and other Indonesian military officers and giving them the money, arms, intelligence and political support that caused catastrophic trauma. As a smart and sensitive boy who played soccer on Jakarta's dusty Haji Ramli Street, Obama surely felt this trauma among his friends and families devastated by state-sponsored terrorism and mass murder.

Nor did Obama mention in his interview the strategies in support of the military coup planned and executed out of the same embassy where his mother worked as an English teacher.

When asked by a reporter in 1990 about dissident lists prepared by the CIA and U.S. State Department and given to the Indonesian military during the coup, Robert J. Martens, a political attaché who worked at the embassy up until the year before Obama's mother did, replied: "It really was a big help to the (Indonesian) army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad."

While it's absurd to expect Obama to account for the violence and militarism of the U.S. government of his childhood, it is imperative that we hold him accountable to stopping the violence and militarism of the government he's preparing to lead as an adult.

As he's mobbed by throngs of Europoliticos anxious to take pictures with the telegenic Senator during his Grand Tour, the Kennedyesque Obama will also be greeted by thousands of cheering Europeans and Middle Easterners, some of whom will embrace him as a prophet of political good, one who hails the end of the Apocalyptically bad foreign policies of George W. Bush. But, as critically important as it is for Obama to deploy his global rock star appeal (he polls better around the world than he does in the U.S.) in the cause of healing the U.S. image abroad, the Camelot factor will go only so far; simply American Idol-ing -- making large crowds feel like their anti-war, anti-militarism vote actually counts -- Europe, the Middle East and the world will not work for very long on today's very tenuous geopolitical stage. The cheering crowds -- and we -- would be wise to stop for more than a few commercial breaks to ask what Obama's relationship will and should be to the bloody undercurrent running beneath both Bushism and the Indonesia policy of his childhood: U.S. militarism and empire.