About the Lankan critique of Obama

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(October 12, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Not that journalists are over-fond of writing about America. But then when the US Secretary of State says rape was a war tactic in Sri Lanka, and later gets the state department to do a lame retraction of sorts on her behalf, we can’t shut up and put up. No, not even when some other worthies say that we are unnecessarily and maybe even crudely demonising America.

The point being made by some folks, succinctly, is that Sri Lankans should be circumspect in criticising American suddhas who are, especially after the advent of Obama, on the path to moral moksha. Oh, my!

I don’t know about that, but with Clinton talking of rape as a war weapon in Sri Lanka —— a laughable fib —— rather than us drone on, no pun intended, we need to sit up and inquire whether this Secretary of State’s president, has moved away much from the hick and boorish foreign policy paradigm that characterised the Bush years.

There are various worthies who can be quoted on the Obama administration and the new hope engendered, and these quoted worthies maybe hail from places as far afield as Havana and Fallujah.

But we don’t know about what the Cubans have said, but much before Obama last week hunkered down to take a decision on Afghanistan and what to do with US troop levels in that country, Tariq Ali —- an expert on these issues —— characterised Obama’s plan there as a disaster. (In an interview with Der Standard in May of this year, Tariq Ali was asked, “In essence, Obama is taking Bush’s “War on Terror” further, even though it’s no longer called that?’’ Ali’s reply: As far as AfPak — Afghanistan and Pakistan — is concerned, Obama is worse, because he is escalating the war. Nobody in Washington can tell me what its purpose, the real war aim, is. What do they want? They want to withdraw from Afghanistan — only not immediately. But the longer they stay, the worse it gets. I have told Obama advisers: To continue the occupation of a country of 24 million people, you are ready to destabilize a country of 180 million. We will pay dearly for that. You need an exit strategy. Only the regional powers can help stabilize the region, you should involve them.)

Ali said all of this, this year, well into the new Obama administration’s term, and suggested that any surge of troops in Afghanistan would lead to a protracted war and a complete disaster which would spill over to Pakistan. He had for long been advocating regional mediation in Afghanistan with China and other powers helping in an armistice.

Escalation

The present escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and the request —— more of a demand - - for some 40,000 more troops there by General McCrystal, indicates Tariq Ali was right about Obama’s flawed policy in Afghanistan. Obama’s surge of troops earlier this year there, just did not work.

So much then for Obama shaping the zeitgeist.

There are more very sane people —— not raving lunatic Repubs such as Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck - - who seem to think on the same lines as Ali. In a recent interview, Gore Vidal said that Obama just doesn’t hack it, (that’s a verbatim quote...) and would be a one term president.

So all of those overtly sanguine messages about Obama though they can be made from Havana to Hungary to Oslo, have to be tempered with the wisdom of left intellectuals such as Ali and Vidal and many others, who feel Obama is on a flight path to disaster. These people are not rabid Islamic fundamentalist clerics either - - they are some of the western world’s most articulate albeit radical thinkers.

Obama and the zeitgeist? Why, Obama led a charge for Chicago to be the venue for the 2016 Olympic games, and though everybody in the voting panel in Copenhagen were very nice to the president and the first lady, we all know what the outcome of that campaign was. Brazil’s Lula da Silva walked away with the prize, with Obama’s city not making the cut to even enter into the second round of voting, the only city to be thus eliminated

So much for this obligatory global feel-good fest about the ostensible change that Obama has wrought both in America and the world. That Obama in general is an improvement on Bush is obvious and so obvious as not to merit mention, but that does not make Obama and post Obama foreign policy in the world, acquire a halo as its packaging.

The point is that Obama is perpetuating the same foreign policy failures of the Bush years, and as if Afghanistan — as explained by Tariq Ali - - is not enough, he is most likely fomenting war with Iran, which is being set up for an American incursion on trumped-up charges of acquiring a nuclear weapon, when there is little evidence of such an acquisition.

Trumped up incursion

A trumped up incursion in Iran of course would be Obama’s WMD, just as Afghanistan is now poised to be Obama’s Vietnam, and yet we are being basically told that Obama shaped the zeitgeist and that Obama’s foreign policy, if it should not make us orgasmic, should at the least, as inferred, make us supplicate in wonderment at the panache and wisdom of this new enlightened philosopher king.

Oh, please!

In the first place, calling out patently egregious foreign policy persued by the Obama administration is not a white vs. black thing but it’s a right versus wrong thing, and once we get that out of the way, we can begin to examine with the sophistication brought into the issue by minds such as Vidal’s and Tariq Ali’s, the glaring moral decrepitude of the current Obama foreign policy, and his duplicitous pursuance of domestic policy on vital issues such as health care and “don’t ask don’t tell’’ in the military etc.,

No doubt Obama is a very intelligent and savvy politician. He may yet be playing a game that is mimicking his election style which was to be soft on the specifics, and to woo independents by being fuzzy on the policy and not aligning himself overtly with the left or the right.

But governance is something else. True, due to his remarkable political savvy and due to the rabid and almost racist nature of the republican opposition, Obama may be able to pull off re-election and win a second term in another four years.

But Oabma’s political savvy on the ground is one thing, and his acceptance as a morally upright transformational figure is entirely something else. He might win the next election and push healthcare reform, but none of it will alter the fact that his Secretary of State’s policy towards Sri Lanka has been abysmally repugnant, and belligerent too, or that his general foreign policy a la Afghanistan and Iran shows that he is going in a dangerous direction, or that in terms of domestic policy his health care reform basically panders to the rich insurance companies, or that his bank bailout rescued the fat cat companies that contributed to his election campaign.

As this columnist predicted once before, Obama might drive the final nail into America’s coffin as the predominant superpower, but beyond that there is nothing in Obama and his administration to even be reasonably sanguine about, especially from the perspective of the outsider.

Yes he was the first black American to be elected president, and that was good — but beyond that, considering all of the above, some zeitgeist!

P.S: Now we have the late breaking news that Barak Obama has won the Nobel peace prize, 2009. This is great news for late night comedians, but parents of those children killed in Afghanistan and in Pakistan from drone attacks will not be laughing.

Some wag, Gore Vidal it was I think, once said that Bill Clinton is the John Kennedy of the white trash. I wouldn’t be similarly cruel about Barak Obama, but it does seem that he is the Gandhi of the Norwegians. By the way, please note that the revered peacemaker Gandhi himslef was never honoured with the peace prize by the Nobel Committee.

(Why the current U.S President won the Nobel prize may be because the floundering Obama dirigible needs some very quick ballast from generally supportive quarters.)

-Sri Lanka Guardian