Obama no dove just a smarter hawk....

[General Duke]

The president-elect is not a dove - he is just a much smarter hawk

 

It'll be hard to demonise the Great Satan led by Barack Hussein Obama. But peaceniks shouldn't assume a kindred spiritComments

 

Jonathan Freedland

 

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday November 12 2008

 

That noise you've been hearing for the past week, the one that began in the United States last Tuesday before spreading throughout the world? That's the sound of a global sigh of relief. It contained a cry of joy too, of course, especially among black Americans and people of colour across the globe, seeing a man who looks like them ascend, at last, to the highest office in the world. But history will record November 4 2008 not only as the day when America elected its first black president, but as the moment when one of the bleakest chapters in the postwar era drew to a close.

 

How else to explain scenes - on the streets of Athens and Nairobi as well as Washington and New York - of jubilation that are surely without precedent in the democratic world? What I saw in Grant Park, Chicago, last week felt more akin to South Africa in 1994 or Berlin in 1989 than a normal response to a regular election. The dancing till the small hours, the honking of car horns, the tearful hugs between strangers, these are images we associate with peaceful revolutions, the celebrations that might follow the ejection of a loathed regime.

 

Perhaps that is how many Americans - and hundreds of millions around the globe - do indeed see the election of Barack Obama. For the past eight years, I regularly argued against the claim that anti-Americanism was on the rise in Europe and beyond. On the contrary, I said, most Britons and Europeans remained remarkably well-disposed to the United States: it was just the Bush administration they couldn't stand.

 

The global reaction last week suggested I wasn't wrong. Witness the sheer speed with which - once George Bush had been dispatched - the citizens of the world rushed to embrace America once more. It turns out the world was not just ready but eager for the US to lead again; it just didn't want Bush to do the leading.

 

The result is that the most pressing questions of international life now stand in a wholly new light. Part of that is the warm, amber glow of affection, verging on adulation, for President-elect Obama. (He is surely the first politician since Nelson Mandela whose face can be worn on a T-shirt without embarrassment.) But it's more substantive than that.

 

Take the conflict that defined the age of Bush, the "war on terror". Instantly, that conflict is changed in character. It becomes much harder for violent jihadists to demonise the United States when the Land of the Great Satan is led by Barack Hussein Obama, whose African step-grandmother is still a practising Muslim. Before he has signed a single executive order, the president-elect has won a decisive battle in the propaganda war. It's not only Obama's name that will make the lives of jihadism's recruiters harder. He reportedly aims to order a planned withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, phased over 16 months, within a few weeks of taking office. As Obama vowed in the very last rally of his campaign - an extraordinarily atmospheric, late-night address to nearly 100,000 people standing in what was little more than an empty field in Manassas, Virginia - "I will end this war."

 

What's more, Obama is open to negotiation in a way that separates him from his predecessor. In Afghanistan, the talk now is of finding "reconcilables": Taliban fighters who are not motivated by hardcore ideology and might be induced to lay down their weapons. Obama took plenty of heat for it in the campaign, but he maintains the same willingness to talk to Iran and Syria.

 

And yet liberals and anti-war types should not declare the new president a kindred spirit too hastily. As Obama himself said in the now famous 2002 speech denouncing the Iraq adventure: "I am not opposed to all wars." It's true that he avoids the phrase "war on terror". But that is not because he thinks there is no war to be fought. His disagreement with Bush was that the latter had failed to define America's enemy clearly. It was not an abstract noun - terror - but a specific organisation with a specific leader, namely al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. Indeed, one of Obama's central critiques of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that it diverted attention and resources from the true fight - against the men who had actually attacked the US on September 11 2001.

 

So peaceniks should not be surprised to read the report in yesterday's Washington Post that Obama "intends to renew the US commitment to the hunt for Osama bin Laden". It's not only that Obama scored crucial political points with his unbending stance in the televised debates - "We will kill Bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida" (a Democrat, for once, outhawking a Republican on national security). That position also happens to fit with Obama's genuine view of the threat to America's safety.

 

Having placed al-Qaida back in the centre of America's gunsights, the new president aims to defeat it, taking the fight to al-Qaida's enablers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even as he pulls troops out of Iraq, Obama aims to send thousands more to fight the Taliban. He was ahead of Bush in calling for the theatre of operations against al-Qaida to be expanded beyond the Afghan borders to include the tribal areas of western Pakistan where many believe Bin Laden is holed up. Put simply, Obama is no dove. He is just a much smarter hawk, his eye more sharply focused.

 

The new disposition on Iran is similarly nuanced. The noises are much less warlike. Obama promises diplomacy and dialogue, and relegates force to where it should be: a last, not a first, resort. But his own advisers counsel that Obama is firm on this matter. He has concluded that Tehran cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power, not least because it would trigger a regional arms race. He will use negotiation to thwart that possibility. But if that fails, the use of force remains an option.

 

And that's when the new global context could make all the difference. Imagine if John McCain had toured European capitals, trying to assemble a coalition for strikes against Iran. He'd have barely got a hearing. Two million people would have marched in London waving banners declaring: "We won't get fooled again."

 

But if Obama were to make the case, explaining that he had seen through the nonsense of Iraqi WMD but that the Iranian threat was real, he would surely earn a very different response. In that sense if no other, armed international action against Iran might be more achievable under an Obama presidency than it would have been otherwise.

 

Other areas are more straightforward. On climate change, a denier in the White House has been replaced by a believer. Tellingly, Obama's proposed bail-out of the American auto industry does not propose chucking money at Detroit to keep churning out the same old cars. Instead, Democrats want a loan programme to help the auto companies start making fuel-efficient vehicles. That fits with Obama's wider approach to the economic crisis - to see it as an opportunity to spend money to make America greener.

 

In every sphere, Obama marks a break from the recent past. He will not be perfect; the disappointments will be real and may come soon. But for now, at least, we are entitled to that sigh of relief - and even the odd yelp of joy.

 

• freedland@guardian.co.uk

[General Duke]

This man will criple the networks around the world and notably the ones in East Africa..

[nuune]

Originally posted by General Duke:

This man will criple the networks around the world and notably the ones in East Africa..

[General Duke]

^^^Adeer Obama is a local, and he will have a great effect on Somalia and its peace. Read the post old man before you chase Duke's shadow

 

It's not only that Obama scored crucial political points with his unbending stance in the televised debates -

"We will kill Bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida"

(a Democrat, for once, outhawking a Republican on national security). That position also happens to fit with Obama's genuine view of the threat to America's safety.

Whats good for Kenya is also good for Somalia.