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The challenges facing Obama

Published 07 November 2008

Just what direction will the president-elect take on South America, Israel and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ponders Hugh O'Shaughnessy

How can one put this diplomatically?

Barack Obama, who thrilled a majority of the US people with his electoral victory on Tuesday, has to be careful about the information he receives from his advisers about Latin America if he is not to repeat the blunders committed by his predecessor or indeed commit similar ones.

Much of the rest of the world has justifiedly been cheering the triumph of a man of mixed race and the son of a black father. He is about to move into a White House built with black slave labour (and subsequently burned by British soldiers). Yet those cheers have obscured foreigners’ enduring distaste with a US whose political plans were as ignorant as its financial strategies were catastrophic.

Mr Bush, for instance, heard his diplomats in the State Department telling him that they had squared foreign politicians to accept the US international kidnapping policies - euphoniously renamed “extraordinary rendition”, and torture policies - equally misnamed “abuse”. Misguidedly he went on to believe that the peoples of Europe and elsewhere were meekly accepting Washington’s sustained flouting of international treaties and the elementary rules of natural justice. Hence the Republican Party’s blubbering mien in recent years and its surprised and anguished cries of “Why don’t they love us?”

Sadly there are signs that the future president’s councillors have already been setting him on the wrong rails, filling his head with ideas for an even more militaristic US. “I strongly support the expansion of our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 Marines,” Obama told an audience in Chicago in April. Where are they going to fight?

And how will he vary US economic strategies when he accepts big fat campaign gifts from such as Goldman Sachs ($799,821), JPMorgan Chase ($529,012), Citigroup ($523,948) and Lehman Brothers - when they were still alive and solvent - ($403,624).

His advisers have been steering him down a cul-de-sac by telling him to accept Israel’s policies on the Middle East and pledge US finance and military support for that country’s illegal occupation of Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian territory.

In Latin America the President-elect appears, for instance, to believe that the legitimate president of Venezuela, one Hugo Chávez, is some sort of dictatorial mountebank because bodies such Human Rights Watch allege - on little or no evidence - that he is.

Have we heard any protests from the Obama camp, say about US political skulduggery against the equally legitimate government of Bolivia? Will the man who has done so much to strengthen the self-respect of people of African blood in the US side with white racists in South America - from Santa Cruz in Bolivia to Guayaquil - in their savage struggle to keep the indigenes down? Do we hear murmurs when the President of Ecuador shows that US agencies had their fingers in the murderous raid by Colombian forces on Ecuadorean territory a few months back? Have the Obama advisers come out against the comfortable presence on US soil of convicted terrorists from Central America and the Caribbean such as the man who blew up a Cuban airliner off Barbados with the loss of scores of lives?

Is there any indication that an Obama government would call of the increasingly bloody and futile “war on drugs” – the minor narcotics such as cocaine and marijuana, not the major ones like tobacco and alcohol which produce corporate profits and government tax revenue? As anyone with local knowledge could have foreseen, this “war” has in recent weeks produced more murders in Mexico and more scandals among the ranks of the armed forces of Colombia than ever before.

The unfortunate fact is that none of these questions has had the right answer.

More immediately the impending arrival of a strong flotilla of the Russian navy in Venezuelan waters will challenge the gifts of political judgement of a president-elect who is about to inherit a country whose foreign military adventures have bought widespread death, destruction and bereavement to millions in the Arab world. The testing of Obama is already starting.

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7 comments from readers

writeon
08 November 2008 at 10:18

I can understand that Obama's 'race' is regarded as important, but why exactly? Why is Obama 'black' and not 'white'? Who cares? I think he uses his race, whatever that is and means, for political advantage, and this disturbs me and the reaction to his race disturbs me. Why is his race so important? Shoul it matter what he race is? What does it symbolize. Is 'black' a sign of authenticity or soul or coolness, or what?

I think Europeans have a simplistic attitude towards the colour question in the United States. It's incredibly complex and we don't understand it. We have a positive attitude towards black Americans and are wary of criticising them.

Remember, it was George Bush who employed Rice and Powell in his cabinet, two disaters, yet somehow they recieved far gentler treatment from the media than if they'ed been traditional white politicians, and they were chosen specifically for that reason.

Why should rightwing politicians and officials be treated differently because they have black skins?

Joe C
08 November 2008 at 11:12

Are you so naive Evo Morales who orchestrated the Pando massacre and made it look like the US and Pando Mayor were responsible.Evo the same one who has increased cocaine production in Bolivia.The person one whom has robbed Europe and other Latin American countries of any foreign investments they had.The person who is creating relationships with Libia,Iran and North Korea to sell their uranium ore to when the rest of the world is trying to avoid nuclear proliferation. This Bolivian president won a majority in the last elections my dead grandparents even voted for him, some how and so did many other dead people from as long as 70 years ago, could that mean there was fraud with the elections? No one in the MEDIA will ever accuse a Poor Farmer of being corrupt. There is no freedom of press in Bolivia or Venezuela yet the world press supports them. Critics are threatened, arrested,kidnapped,tortured,beaten and killed. Yet they get nominated for the Nobel Peace prize. What kind of sick world is this?

Martin Edwin Andersen
08 November 2008 at 18:13

When it comes to Latin America, I truly hope the Obama team will give a pass on including former Hillary Clinton supporter Arturo Valenzuela on its foreign policy team.

I resigned in protest as the senior analyst for Latin America for the human rights group Freedom House--who I worked for from 1997 to 2005-- over the treatment they planned to give Mexico in their annual "Freedom in the World" report.

I had given Mexico low marks in its country write-up due to the violence and fear created by drug mafias and their police protectors in the northern states bordering the U.S. More than 900 people had been killed in the first nine months of that year and journalists, in particular, had fled several cities in fear.

Against all evidence, Freedom House's academic advisory member Valenzuela demanded on giving Mexico a pass on the issue.

Valenzuela claimed that violence wasn't a major issue in Mexico, and that, of all the countries in Latin America, it was our southern neighbor he knew best.

Valenzuela, a Georgetown professor with whom I had previously clashed for his being an apologist for Argentina's corrupt president Carlos Menem and who had loudly defended Venezuela's Hugo Chavez on press freedom, prevailed.

I then announced my resignation.

Like Henry Kissinger, Valenzuela has made a career of rising up the bureaucratic ladder while leaving a string of questionable judgments in his wake.

sweety
10 November 2008 at 06:21

Obama faces exactly the same issues as Bush did but without the ambivalence of Clinton's dubious legacies. Clinton did rendition, and also bombed for fun! This all started with Carter in 1979. "You are either with us or against us", applies more now than ever witness the Obama comments about the North West Frontier, nominally attached to Pakistan, did he really make these as attributed?

The capture of Bin Laden would be a real boost sending Obama's ratings into the stratosphere but Bin Ladens remains are probably known only to a few of the faithful.

bodek_tzitziyot
11 November 2008 at 01:22

"... Israel's...illegal occupation of Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian territory..."

There is nothing "illegal" about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights. These territories were captured in the 1967 war, which was initiated by the tripartite military alliance of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. These three states between them blockaded the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, shelled Israeli civilian targets and prepared to invade Israel and drive the Jews into the sea, all acts of war and aggression under international law. Israel is legally entitled to occupy these territories, and the Arabs are legally obliged to recognize Israel, negotiate peace with Israel and reach agreement with Israel on secure borders.

While Israel is a scrupulous observer of international law, the Arabs states are serial violators of international law. Illegal Arab acts include the massacre and expulsion of Jews from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which was carried out by the Palestine Arab militias and the British-officered Jordanian Army in 1948. Also illegal is the Arab League sanctioned campaign of persecution, dispossession and expulsion carried out against Jewish citizens of Arab states in 1948 and after. And equally illegal is the contemporary Arab campaign to expel Jewish residents from the West Bank territiories, with the aim of creating an ethnically pure Jew-free West Bank, an apartheid Palestinian state.

writeon
11 November 2008 at 21:53

Dear Bodek,

You almost had me there! Suberb piece of satire. You've got a gift for parody. Only, and this isn't meant as criticism, you might have overdone the ultra-Zionist propaganda a little. Too much and it tends to over-egg the pudding. I only caught onto you in the last sentence.

bodek_tzitziyot
12 November 2008 at 02:01

writeon wrote: "... I only caught on to you in the last sentence..."

I'm not sure you did, but you can check for yourself by reading my comments below, and let us know.

You ascribe to me parodic and satiric intent, and I am glad you noticed that some of my verbal formulations had ironic resonances. But everything I wrote is literally true. And I don't do propaganda; at least not by the commonly accepted definition where "propaganda is persuading others to believe what you yourself do not believe".

Calumnies in the media against Israel and against Zionism are today very commonplace and prevalent. Words such as the ones I wrote are contrary to accepted wisdom among some on the left. But that, in itself, is not a refutation of their accuracy and worth.