The mood around the 2008 US Presidential campaign of Barack Obama, though it only begins officially today, has already reached hysteric levels. Just some quick thoughts on this.
At this early stage it seems prudent to point out the inherent irrationality of basing our assessment of a politician’s merits on some vague, warm rhetoric. The relaxed, affable, sax-playing Bill Clinton presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the larger proportion infants, during his term in office, as Western sanctions strangled Iraq’s civilian population (thus strengthening Saddam). When challenged on the fact that half a million dead Iraqi infants was more than had been killed at Hiroshima, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said that the price was “worth it”. This may not sit well with our image of Clinton the man, but it happened nevertheless.
One could make similar points about Tony Blair, and the lesson, with both Obama and our own David Cameron, is to ignore the froth and look closely at what’s actually happening. Obama and Cameron are apparently afraid of us doing just that, which is why almost nothing of substance in terms of policy proposals is being offered by either of them as yet. However, if you look closely, you can glean an insight into the political character of each. In the case of Obama, this little quote from an NBC interview discussing Iraq, caught my eye:
“We’re not going to baby sit a civil war”
This statement would sound entirely natural coming from any conservative Republican, both in its callousness and in its casually racist contempt for the Iraqi “babies” that the American adult is being forced - by its own benign if misguided nature - to nursemaid. Indeed, it could have been uttered by just about any imperial policymaker airily dismissing trouble with the natives on the periphery since the dawn of human civilisation.
Indeed, those who see Obama as offering a complete break with the dark days of the hoary old Bush administration should consider who shares his propensity for infantilising the imperial subjects. Here’s another great liberal hope, Donald Rumsfeld:
“Getting Iraq straightened out… was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: ‘They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start.”
And apparently, Rumsfeld’s old boss, who once marketed himself as a unifying, compassionate conservative, likes the analogy as well. This from May 2004:
“President Bush sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his Iraq plan Thursday, saying Iraqis are ready to "take the training wheels off" by assuming some political power. "He talked about 'time to take the training wheels off,'" said Rep. Deborah Pryce. "The Iraqi people have been in training, and now it's time for them to take the bike and go forward."”
The notion that the Iraqis are infantile, defective material unable or unwilling to make use of western munificence scarcely merits discussion, but for the record: the destruction of Iraqi society has come in no small part through our own actions. It was our sanctions and bombing of infrastructure that sent Iraq back into the third world, and the unprovoked invasion of 2003, the disastrous economic and political administration of the coalition, and the resulting chaos that turned it into a basket case.
All societies have sectarian and/or ethnic divisions, but they only come to blows when the social fabric unravels and the state itself fails. Plainly those individuals committing the sectarian killing in Iraq are responsible for their actions. But responsibility for the calamitous state of the country also falls on those states and statespersons whose backing of Saddam, sanctions, wars and general crimes and failures led to the destruction of the society and set the scene for the current bloodbath. Few societies could have suffered what Iraq has suffered at our hands in the past few decades without descending into bloody chaos.
To crown these achievements by elevating to the US Presidency a man who sees the destruction we have wrought as evidence of Iraqi infantilism, and to all but canonise the man as a liberal secular-saint, would be to dampen one of the few hopes that has arisen from the years since 9/11: namely that more people might have woken up to the real nature of western power. The emerging “Obamania” appears to teach us that many people have, sadly, learnt nothing at all from the events of recent years.
Update - 6 March 2007:
Labels: Barack Obama, Civil War, Clinton, Iraq, Israel/Palestine
