At today's Obama rave in Oregon, the Manchurian candidate was loudly defended by retired US Air Force General Merrill McPeak, one of Obama's high-profile handlers. McPeak accused Bill Clinton of McCarthyite tactics (or was it lèse majesté?) for remarks in which Obama's holy name was not even mentioned. Who then is Obama's new defender? McPeak is a Republican Bush family appointee who was named as Air Force Chief of Staff by President George H.W. Bush in October of 1990. McPeak took over during the time of Operation Desert Shield, and assisted in the overall target selection and strategic planning for the First Gulf War ("Operation Desert Storm") of January-February 1991. During that time McPeak's forces flew about 130,000 sorties over Iraq, bombing that country back into the stone age as part of a Bush-Kissinger operation. It was estimated at the time that if each sortie had killed just one Iraqi, then 130,000 Iraqis had already died when the bombing stopped.
In particular, McPeak was the mastermind of the cowardly and infamous "bomb now, die later" strategy which targeted civilian drinking water and sewage treatment facilities, plus civilian transport infrastrcuture and irrigation systyems needed for farming. This was a strategy of deliberate genocide which resulted in hundreds of thousands of delayed action deaths caused by polluted water and concentrated among old people, infants, and the sick. McPeak thus provided an important contribution to the harvest of hatred against the United States, which is about to result in the 4,000th death among the occupying forces. McPeak helped to prepare the current Iraq debacle more than a decade in advance.
According to recently broadcast accounts, McPeak was also a part of the mass killing in East Timor: "Another Obama adviser, General Merrill McPeak, an Air Force man, who not long after the Dili massacre in East Timor in '91I happened to see on Indonesian TV shortly after that-there was General McPeak overseeing the delivery to Indonesia of US fighter planes." (Allan Nairn, Democracy Now, January 3, 2008) Yet, with this record, McPeak has the gall to lecture Democrats on whom they should vote for. Among air power genocidalists, McPeak is up there with Bomber Harris of RAF Bomber Command and Gen. Curits LeMay of the Tokyop firestorms. Is this change we can believe in?
McPeak is a typical reactionary Republican, having served as Oregon state chairman for the Bob Dole campaign in 1996. In 2000, he enthusiastically endorsed George W. Bush, and worked for Bush as co-chair of Oregon Veterans for Bush. Maybe McPeak should keep his election advice to himself. Instead of pontificating at Obama rallies, he should be standing in the dock at Nuremberg to answer for high crimes against humanity, including genocide in Iraq.
Maybe McPeak's admiration for Obama is due to Obama's status as a trigger-happy warmonger who was ready to bomb both Iran and Pakistan during his US Senate campaign (David Mendell, "Obama would consider missile strikes on Iran," Chicago Tribune, Sept. 25, 2004). Obama now wants to bomb Pakistan maybe McPeak is drawing up the plans for that one already. (Jake Tapper, "Anti-War Obama Pushes Pakistan Invasion," ABC News, August 1, 2007). Or maybe it is just that McPeak likes Obama's plan to choose a Republican running mate or Secretary of Defense like Hagel or Lugar. (Sarah Baxter, "Barnstorming Obama plans to pick Republicans for cabinet," London Sunday Times, March 2, 2008).
With the Obama campaign in desperate straits over the last several weeks, a shocking parade of the candidate's elitist backers have been forced to rush to his public defense. Just over the past few days we have seen the following: Zbigniew Brzezinski (Pol Pot supporter who created the 1979 Afghan-Soviet and 1980 Iran-Iraq wars), Jay Rockefeller (Bush's man on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and son of genocidalist John D. Rockefeller III), Joseph Nye (Trilateral-Bilderberger theoretician of imperialist "soft power"), and now "Bomb Now, Die Later" McPeak. Is this what a future Obama confrontation cabinet would look like? McPeak, for his part, looks like Death Warmed Over.