Obama's Rambo Foreign Policy
By Cliff Kincaid
January 28, 2008
Page 3 of 4
The American people have seen many television and newspaper ads about fighting "genocide" around the world but our media have not examined the dangerous implications of the U.S. actually adopting a foreign policy of addressing all of these conflicts and trying to resolve them. The propaganda has had its intended effect. Democrats―and some Republicans―now agree that the U.S. military has to be deployed around the world to take care of any number of humanitarian and refugee problems. It is interesting that the movie Rambo includes real film footage of the crisis in Burma. That was obviously done to make a point.
Interestingly, Rambo, in the person of actor Sylvester Stallone, has endorsed John McCain for president. McCain now talks about sending Stallone up against Mike Huckabee supporter Chuck Norris, who plays a good guy in the TV show "Walker, Texas Ranger." But the real issue is whether McCain agrees with the Democrats about intervening in endless trouble spots and civil wars around the world. It turns out he does.
While opposing a quick U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, McCain wrote in the Washington Post in 2004 that "The international community today has the power to help the powerless inside Burma throw off the shackles of tyranny. It is time to assume this moral responsibility. It is time to act." In 2006, McCain was back in the pages of the Post, this time advocating military intervention in Darfur. "In Darfur, the moment of truth is now," he said. Back in 2000, he favored economic sanctions against Russia because of its human rights violations in Chechnya.
If it turns out to be McCain against Obama or Hillary in the general election, the American people might find that there is a real foreign policy disagreement between the two only on the matter of a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq.
Stallone has endorsed McCain, but his movie serves the foreign policy interests of Obama, Clinton & Company.
Stallone, who's been promoting the movie on conservative radio programs, says that he decided to focus the film on Burma after he called Soldier of Fortune magazine and the United Nations and asked for the most underreported human rights situation on the planet. They told him it was Burma.
Bigger Foreign Policy Problems
Soldier of Fortune, while interviewing Stallone about the movie and promoting it, does not favor U.S. military action there. Harold C. Hutchison writes on the SOF website, "Burma, for all the evils that its dictatorship visits upon its own people, is not threatening other countries, is not trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and it has not attacked us or regional allies. We have a global war on terror to deal with, dealing with folks who wish to do all three. The sad fact is that we have bigger fish to fry than these thugs in [the capital of Burma] Rangoon. Washington knows it, and so does the Burmese junta. So for now, we cannot do much, if anything."
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