Obama’s Audacity of Doom

It is indeed a strange spectacle of a Nobel Peace Laureate, President Barack Obama, blithely marching through three major warfields—one he inherited from his predecessor, the other inherited, all right, but modified and renewed as his own, and the third one entirely of his own making. True, several Nobel Peace Prize winners had received this coveted world prize with their blood-stained hands while it bypassed the universally acclaimed apostles of peace. This is the irony of the human situation which the celebrated British writer, George Orwell, foretold in his two dystopias, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four. He visualised this situation in a world dominated by Soviet communism. He might be turning in his grave that this is happening in liberal democracies that are now enthusiastically engaged in shaping a post-Soviet world order in which they could be absolute masters.

President Barack Obama won the 2008 US presidential election creating history and heightening the expectations of not only war-wearied people of America but also peace-loving peoples all over the world who based their hopes on two of his autobiographical books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. An Afro-American becoming the tenant of the White House itself was history. His ideas and ideals contained in his writings in uplifting prose captured the imagination of sensitive minds all over the world. Here is a President of mixed racial and religious origin with an emancipated liberal mind imbued with a deep sense of justice and fair play. His Civil Rights fight background was another aspect that added an activist side to his personality. Close on the heels of his election to the Presidency came the nomination to the Nobel Prize for Peace of the year.

The Swedish Academy’s choice was a definite message which the world soon realised had fallen flat on Obama. From day one of his tenancy of the White House, Obama’s effort was to appease his rivals and critics in the country. The colour of his skin, his middle name and his family background were all perhaps responsible for his timidity. In matters of policy to recover the economy from the alarming crisis and the implementation of health insurance, which was one of his main policy planks, President Obama’s response was knee-jerking, to say the least. By retaining the Defence Secretary of his predecessor, George Bush, whose wars were great inter-national disasters he made himself a prisoner of his predecessor’s military-industrial complex. Both Afghanistan and Iraq were festering with “missions” unachieved, and, particularly in Afganistan, which is now agreed almost on all hands as unachievable. George Bush’s declaration—‘Mission Achieved’ in Iraq—on the deck of Abraham Lincoln on an All Fools’ Day remained a foolish one.

The push to knock the Taliban from power having succeeded, Bush should have stopped the war and concentrated on a strong initiative of a robust administrative arrangement that would prevent the country from becoming again a haven of the Al Qaeda. That he could not capture or kill Bin Laden, as he angrily promised immediately after September Eleven and even before the invasion of Afganistan, was the greatest sense of defeat that sat heavily on the mind of George Bush. The continuation of the war there with the help of Pakistan and with no clearly defined aim was a signal failure in all respects. It was this war that Obama took up to fight to its again undefined end, inducting more men and money. At every stage of its prosecution all men, both military and political, knew that the war is a futile one. Obama’s time-table for intensification, successful end and withdrawal from the country spinned out of his political control soon after it began anew.

Obama has to face the re-election, which he has formally announced next year, and as he was finding it difficult to bring back the US soldiers home by then, which he had clearly promised, the only political way out is to begin a new war just to divert the attention of the general public and silence the war hawks in both the parties since the interests of the industrial-military complex have been deeply embedded in the political system far more dangerously than in 1969 when Eisenhover warned the nation of its danger.

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THE war in Libya has all the ingredients to satisfy the warmongers at home. Libya is an Arab country rich in oil resources ruled by an arrogant Arab nationalist Muslim dictator who is the product of the pan-Arab national socialist movement of Gemal Abdul Nassar; Nasser’s revolutionary fervour infected this, then young, Libyan who captured power from King Idris when he was holidaying in Italy. But the grand political vision of Arab unity of Nasser was betrayed by the feudal rulers joining hands with Israel and Western imperialist players in the region as it is being done now.

The democratic movement that began in Tunisia soon spread to Egypt like praire fire and forced one of the oldest political dictators of this most populous ancient Arab country, Hosni Mubarak, to step down. In all those days Obama played apparently as a cheer leader of this beautiful democratic movement to the elation of the people of the region and democrats abroad. But when the waves inevitably reached Bahrain, one of the smallest countries of the region with a population of hardly 15 million people, half of them workers of all kinds from South Asian countries, mostly from the Indian subcontinent, the US sat up. Because Bahrain is the home of the Fifth US Fleet, a highly strategic force in its control of the region. Though the Khalifa of Bahrain was soft and conciliatory in his approach to the protesters who soon became insistent on the Khalifa stepping down handing over power to the people. The crowd, gathered on the Pearl Round at the capital of the Caliphate, Manama, consisted mainly of Shias who constituted the majority of the population while the ruler is a Sunni. Iran, the Shia power in the neighbourhood, had a tactical control over the agitating crowd which alarmed both the US and its closest political ally in the region, the Saudi ruling family. They were in diplomatic contact with the main organisational players there, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic countries (OIC) and the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC). The African Union (AU) was left out of the present confabulations as it was not easily tamable as the three other outfits were. The US ordered the Saudi ruler to send forces to Manama, and the US-made tanks and other fighting equipments rolled into the capital of the small but oil rich Caliphate, Bahrain. The demo-cracy demonstration at the Pearl Round soon evaporated when the Saudi soldiers brutally attacked the crowd who refused to vacate the strategic point.

This was indeed a sudden anti-climax to the surging drama at this most unlikely stage for the enactment of such a sanguine story. But the US, France and their feudal partners are in this deep conspiracy to thwart a natural political upsurge, and they found in Libya, again in Maghrib, from where the movement suddenly started, a convenient and profitable target to divert attention of the world from this greatest betrayal. As it was difficult to mobilise popular opinion against Muammar Gaddafi due to its tribal power structure, the US went into regular invasion and war in this North African country with a hastily drafted and passed UN resolution in the voting of which India along with the permanent members, Russia and China, abstained from voting. It seemed to the world that Iraq is being repeated with the no-fly zone, arms and money to those who oppose Gaddafi and wild allegations of human rights violation, etc. etc.

In the midst of the fight and in the context of the growing conflict between Iran and US allies like Saudi Arabia and GCC countries comes Obama’s decision to seek a second term in the next presidential election though his popularity has shrunk considerably and the Republican leaders are mounting a furious campaign against the President even if there is no unity among them. With the US’ present political involvement in Libya, shifting the major burden of war on to the NATO, perhaps Obama may be able to retrieve his lost base. In the context of the growing power of the military-industrial complex, Obama may also be able to romp home as the US is unlikely to let down an incumbent. The President is embroiled not in one but virtually three wars, the latest one has only just begun. With that the people are likely to forget the failure of his Afpak policy which all know is doomed to failure for reasons beyond Obama and his efforts. But the new Libyan war too does not kindle any audacity of hope but only of doom.

Dr N.A. Karim is a former Professor of English and the erstwhile Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram.