[Reader-list] On Obama

[V Ramaswamy]

>From Economic & Political Weekly, November 1, 2008


The Technician in the Establishment: Obama's America and the World

by Vinay Lal

On November 4, Barack Obama will in all likelihood be elected the 44th
president
of the United States. As against the euphoria in the rest of the world about
such a presidency, this article reads into his 2006 book (The Audacity of
Hope)
and his campaign speeches, a different kind of Obama. He emerges as a
technician
who is best equipped to fix broken policies and get America working once
again.

One can only hope that a US that is once again working does not mean a US
that
is more efficient in its exercise of military domination and even more
successful in projecting its own vision of human affairs as the only road to
the
good life. To believe in Obama, one needs to hope against hope. Barack Obama
is
poised to become the 44th president of the United States. Many see in the
ascendancy of a black man to the highest office of the world's hegemon a
supremely historic moment in American if not world affairs.

Such is the incalculable hold of the US, in times better or worse, on the
imagination of people worldwide that many are more heavily invested in the
politics and future of the US than they are in the politics of their own
nation.

There may yet be method to this maddening infatuation, for Iraqis, Afghanis,
and Pakistanis, among many others, known and unknown, the target at some
point
of the military wrath and moral unctuousness of America, may want to reason
if
their chances of being bombed back into the stone age increase or decrease
with
the election of one or the other candidate. The French, perhaps best known
for
the haughty pride in their own culture, were so moved by the events of
September
11, 2001, which the Americans have attempted to install as a new era in
world
history, rendering 9/11 as something akin to BC or AD, that Le Monde
famously
declared, "Nous sommes tous Americains" (We are all Americans ). One doubts
that, had it been Beijing, Delhi, or Dakar that had been so bombed, the
French
would have declared, We are All Chinese, Indians, or Senegalese. That old
imperialist habit of presuming the royal We, thinking that the French or
American we is the universal We, has evidently not disappeared.

Obama vs McCain
There can be little question that Obama's presidency would be much
preferable to
that of McCain. If nothing else, his presidency is not calculated to be an
insult to human intelligence or a complete affront to simple norms of human
decency. After eight years of George W Bush, it seemed all but improbable
that
America could throw up another candidate who is, if not in absolutely
identical
ways, at least as much of an embarrassment to the US as the incumbent of the
White House. But one should never underestimate the genius of America in
throwing up crooks, clowns and charlatans into the cauldron of politics. It
is
likely that McCain has a slightly less convoluted" or should I say jejune "
view
of world history and geography than Bush, nor is his vocabulary wholly
impoverished, but he will not strike anyone with a discerning mind as
possessed
of a robust intelligence. McCain has already committed so many gaffes,
accusing
(to take one example) Iran of training Al Qaida extremists, that one wonders
whether his much touted "foreign policy experience" amounts to anything at
all.

In America, it is enough to have a candidate who understands that Iraq and
Iran
are not only spelled differently but constitute two separate nations. Obama
seems so far ahead of the decorated Vietnam war veteran in these respects
that
it seems pointless to waste any more words on McCain. Obama writes
reasonably
well, and has even been lauded for his skills as an orator; he is suave,
mentally alert, and a keen observer of world affairs.

Far too many American elections have offered scenarios where a candidate has
been voted into office not on the strength of his intelligence, sound
policies,
or moral judgment, but because the candidate has appeared to be "the lesser
of
two evils" . The iconoclast Paul Goodman, writing in the 1960s, gave it as
his
considered opinion that American elections were an exercise in helping
Americans
distinguish between undistinguishable Democrats and Republicans, and there
are,
notwithstanding Obama's appeal to liberals and apparently intelligent
people,
genuine questions to be asked about whether this election will be anything
more
than a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Candidates with wholly distinct views have always been described as
"spoilers"
in the American system, and anyone who do not subscribe to the rigidly
corporatist outlook of the two major parties can only expect ridicule,
opprobrium, and at best colossal neglect. To this extent, whatever America's
pretensions at being a model democracy for the rest of the world, one can
marvel
at the ease and brilliance with which dissenters are marginalised in the US.
The
singularity of American democracy resides in the fact that it is, insofar as
democracies are in question, at once both perversely primitive and advanced.
In
its totalitarian sweep over the political landscape, the one-party system,
which
through the fiction of two parties has swept all dissent " indeed, I should
say
all thought " under the rug, has shown itself utterly incapable of
accommodating
political views outside its fold; and precisely for this reason American
democracy displays nearly all the visible signs of stability,
accountability,
and public engagement, retaining in its rudiments the same features it has
had
over the last two centuries.

A New Obama after the Election?

Obama's most ardent defenders have adopted the predictably disingenuous view
that Candidate Obama has had to repress most of his liberal sentiments to
appeal
to a wide electorate, and that president Obama will be much less "centrist"
in
his execution of domestic and foreign policies. (The US is one country where
most hawks, particularly if they are "distinguished"  senior statesmen, can
easily pass themselves off as "centrists", the word "hawk"  being reserved
for
certified lunatics such as Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, or blatantly
aggressive policymakers such as Paul Wolfowitz. No one would describe Colin
Powell, who shares as much responsibility as anyone else for waging a
criminal
war on Iraq, as a hawk.) Of course much the same view was advanced apropos
Bill
Clinton, who then went on to wreck the labour movement, cut food stamps,
initiate welfare "reform" that further eroded the entitlements of the poor,
and
launch aggressive military strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo,
and a
host of other places. Moreover, unless one is to take the view that Obama
thought of his candidacy overnight, it is equally reasonable to argue that,
knowing how much he would have to appeal to the rank and file of not only
Democrats but the large number of "undecided" voters as a candidate who
would be
markedly different from both the incumbent and the Republicans running for
the
presidency, Obama has been projecting himself as far more liberal than
either
his political record or views would give warrant to believe. Indeed, as a
close
perusal of his writings, speeches, and voting record suggests, Obama is as
consummate a politician as any in the US, and he has been priming himself as
a
presidential candidate for many years.

Entry to the Obama World View Obama's 2006 book,The Audacity of Hope (New
York,
Crown Publishers), furnishes as good an entry point into his world view as
any.
Its subtitle, "Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream", provides the link
to
Obama's memoir of 1995, Dreams of My Father (1995). People everywhere have
dreams, no doubt, but there is nothing quite as magisterial as "the American
dream": the precise substance of the American dream " a home with a
backyard,
mom's apple pie, kids riding their bikes without a care in the world, a cute
dog
running around in circles after the kids, ice tea, a Chevrolet or SUV "
matters
less than the fact that "the American dream" signifies something grand and
unique in the affairs of humankind. A politician who does not profess belief
in
the American
dream is doomed, but there is no insincerity on Obama's part in this
respect.
Leaving aside the question of how the American dream has been a nightmare to
many of the most thoughtful Americans themselves, from Henry David Thoreau
to
James Baldwin, not to mention tens of millions of people elsewhere, Obama's
fondness for what Americans call "feelgood" language is palpably evident.
Just
what does the audacity of hope mean? Need one be audacious to hope? Obama's
pronouncements are littered with the language of hope, change, values,
dreams,
all only a slight improvement on chicken soup for dummies or chocolate for
the
soul. The chapter entitled ‘The World Beyond Our Borders', some will
object,
is illustrative of Obama's engagement with substantive issues, and in this
case
suggestive of his grasp over foreign affairs. One of the stories that
circulated
widely about Bush upon his election to the presidency in 2000 was that he
carried an expired passport; a variant of the story says that Bush did not
at
that time own a US passport. It is immaterial whether the story is
apocryphal:
so colossal was Bush's ignorance of the world that it is entirely plausible
that
he had never travelled beyond Canada and Mexico, though I am tempted to say
that
illegal aliens and men born to power, transgressors of borders alike, share
more
than we commonly imagine. Obama, by contrast, came to know of the wider
world in
his childhood: his white American mother was married to a Kenyan before her
second marriage to an Indonesian.

Obama lived in Jakarta as a young boy, and the chapter offers a discussion
of
the purges under Suharto that led to the extermination of close to a million
communists and their sympathisers. Obama is brave enough to acknowledge that
many of the Indonesian military leaders had been trained in the US, and that
the
Central Intelligence Agency provided "covert support" to the
insurrectionists
who sought to remove the nationalist Sukarno and place Indonesia squarely in
the
American camp (pp 272-73). He charts Indonesia's spectacular economic
progress,
but also concedes that "Suharto's rule was harshly repressive". The press
was
stifled, elections were a "mere formality", prisons were filled up with
political dissidents, and in commentary november 1, 2008 EPW Economic & P 16
olitical Weekly areas wracked by secessionist movements rebels and civilians
alike faced swift and merciless retribution " "and all this was done with
the
knowledge, if not outright approval, of US administrations" (p 276). It is
doubtful that most American politicians would have made even as mild an
admission of American complicity in atrocities as has Obama. But a supremely
realist framework allows for evasion as much as confession: thus Obama
merely
arrives at the reading that the American record overseas is a "mixed"  one
"across the globe" , often characterised by far-sightedness and altruism
even if
American policies have at times been "misguided, based on false assumptions"
that have undermined American credibility and the genuine aspirations of
others
(p 280). There is, in plain language, both good and bad in this world; and
Obama
avers that the US, with all its limitations, has largely been a force for
good.
And since America remains the standard by which phenomena are to be
evaluated,
Obama betrays his own parochialism.

The war in Vietnam, writes Obama, bequeathed "disastrous consequences":
American
credibility and prestige took a dive, the armed forces experienced a loss of
morale, the American soldier needlessly suffered, and above all "the bond of
trust between the American people and their government" was broken. Though
two
million or more Vietnamese were killed, and fertile land was rendered toxic
for
generations, no mention is made of this genocide: always the focus is on
what
the war did to America (p 287). The war in Vietnam chastened Americans, who
"began to realise that the best and the brightest in Washington didn't
always
know what they were doing " and didn't always tell the truth" (p 287). One
wonders why, then, an overwhelming majority of Americans supported the Gulf
war
of 1991 and the attack on Afghanistan, and why even the invasion of Iraq in
2002
had far more popular support in the US than it did in Europe or elsewhere
around
the world. The suggestion that the American people were once led astray but
are
fundamentally sound in their judgment ignores the consideration that elected
officials are only as good as the people to whom they respond, besides
hastening
to exculpate ordinary Americans from their share of the responsibility for
the
egregious crimes that the US has committed overseas and against some of its
own
people.

Good Wars, Bad Wars?

Obama has on more than one occasion said, "I'm not against all wars, I'm
just
against dumb wars."  More elegant thinkers than Obama, living in perhaps
more
thoughtful times, have used different language to justify war: there is the
Christian doctrine of a just war, and similarly 20th century politicians and
theorists, watching Germany under Hitler rearm itself and set the stage for
the
extermination of the Jewish people, reasoned that one could make a
legitimate
distinction between "good" and "bad"  wars. Obama has something like the
latter
in mind: he was an early critic of the invasion of Iraq, though here again
more
on pragmatic grounds rather than from any sense of moral anguish, but like
most
liberals he gave his whole-hearted support to the bombing of Afghanistan in
the
hope, to use Bush's language, that Osama bin Laden could be smoked out and
the
Taliban reduced to smithereens.

Obama is so far committed to the idea of Afghanistan as a "good" war that he
has
pledged that, if elected president, he would escalate the conflict there and
also bomb Pakistan if it would help him prosecute the "war on terror". He
has
recently attacked McCain, who no one would mistake for a pacifist, with the
observation that his opponent "won't even follow [bin Laden] to his cave in
Afghanistan" , even as the US defence secretary has all but conceded that a
political accommodation with the Taliban, whose support of bin Laden was the
very justification for the bombing of Afghanistan, can no longer be avoided.
The
casually held assumption that by birthright an American president can bomb
other
countries into abject submission, or that the US can never be stripped of
its
prerogative to chastise nations that fail to do its bidding, takes one's
breath
away. No one should suppose that Obama, blinded by the sharp rhetoric of the
"war on terror" , has positions on Iraq and
Afghanistan that are not characteristic of his view of the world as a whole.
"We
need to maintain a strategic force posture", he writes, "that allows us to
manage threats posed by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran and to meet
the
challenges presented by potential rivals like China" (p 307). This could
have
been the voice of Reagan, the Clintons, Bush, McCain, and countless others:
there is such overwhelming unanimity about "rogue states" that almost no
politician in the US can be expected to display even an iota of independent
thinking.

No Change from Staus Quo

On the question of Palestine, Obama has similarly displayed belligerence and
moral turpitude. At the annual meeting in June 2008 of the American Israel
Political Action Committee, a self-avowedly Zionist organisation that
commands
unstinting support from across the entire American political spectrum, Obama
was
unambiguous in declaring that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel
and
it must remain undivided". It would only be belabouring the obvi.ous to
state
that, on nearly every foreign policy issue that one can think of, with the
exception of a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq,
Obama's
position can scarcely be distinguished from all the other advocates of the
national security state. There can be no gainsaying the fact that Obama's
election as president of the US will appreciably alter American debates on
race.
African-Americans make up 12
per cent of the population but constitute nearly half of the US prison
population; one of three black males will, in his lifetime, have gone
through
the criminal justice system. African-Americans are, alongside Puerto Ricans,
two
ethnic groups among whom poverty is endemic, and repeated studies have shown
that in every critical sector of life, such as access to jobs, housing, and
healthcare, blacks face persistent racism and discrimination. Obama is fully
cognisant of these problems and is likely to address them to a greater
extent
than any other candidate. But one can also argue, with equal plausibility,
that
his ascendancy will strengthen the hands of those who want to think of
American
democracy as a post-race society, and whose instant inclination is to
jettison
affirmative action and reduce the already narrow space for discussions of
race
in civil society.

It is immaterial, even if fascinating to some, whether numerous white people
will vote for Obama to prove their credentials as non-racists, while others
will
give him their vote because he is not all that black " just as some black
people
will surely cast their ballot for Obama precisely because he is black. By
far
the most critical consideration is that the US requires a radical
redistribution
of economic and political power: Martin Luther King Jr had come to an
awareness
of this in the last years of his life, but there is little to suggest that
Obama, a professional politician to the core, has similarly seen the light.
Establishment Candidate In these deeply troubled times, when there is much
casual talk of the American ship sinking, the white ruling class is
preparing to
turn over the keys of the kingdom to a black man. Imperial powers had a
knack
for doing this, but let us leave that history aside. Here, at least, Obama
appears to have displayed audacity, taking on a challenge that many others
might
have forsworn.

However, nothing is as it seems to be: with the passage of time, Obama has
increasingly justified the confidence reposed in him as an establishment
candidate. A man with some degree of moral conscience would not only have
shrugged off the endorsements of Colin Powell and Scott McClellan, until
recently among Bush's grandstanding cheerleaders and apparatchiks, but would
have insisted that Powell and others of his ilk be brought to justice for
crimes
against the Iraqi people. But Obama will do no such thing, for after all
Powell
and the master he served, like Kissinger and Nixon before them, only made
"tactical" errors. Obama prides himself, moreover, on being a healer not
divider: he will even rejoice in the support for him among previously
hardcore
Republicans (www.republicansforobama.org).

When Obama is not speaking about values, hope, and change, he presents
himself
as a manager, representing brutal American adventurism in Iraq and
Afghanistan
as illustrations of policies that went wrong. He comes forward as a
technician
who is best equipped to fix broken policies, repair the system, and get
America
working once again. One can only hope that an America that is once again
working
does not mean for a good portion of the rest of the world what it has meant
for
a long time, namely, an America that is more efficient in its exercise of
military domination and even more successful in projecting its own vision of
human affairs as the only road to the good life. To believe in Obama, one
needs
to hope against hope.