A dear friend and fellow traveler, who like me started cheering for Barack Obama early on in his run for the US presidency, these days keeps asking me: “Do you still believe in him?”
And every time I tell her rather timidly, “yes, I still believe in him. It’s too early to give up on Obama. Our man will deliver before he leaves the White House.” And my friend, who doggedly continues to speak for the voiceless and clings on to hope, says, “I hope you are right. I don’t want him to fail either.”
But now, like the legion of other Obama supporters around the world, I am beginning to have my doubts. Even though one still springs up in his defense whenever conversations turn to his stance and the US policies and wars in the Middle East, one has this uneasy, sinking feeling that we have been here before. True, this president is still far better; perhaps a million times better, than his predecessor. In fact, he is everything that George W. Bush was not and thank God for that. It’s not a small feat, not being W.
Unlike his predecessor, our hero believes in what he says: From America’s place in the world to the noble ideals and guiding principles that inspired its founding fathers. I don’t have to quote from Obama’s heart-warming speeches, full of sublime rhetoric, to make my point. Unlike Bush, America’s first nonwhite president clearly believes in dialogue and reconciliation with the world, rather than conflict and confrontation. This has been made repeatedly apparent in his reaching out to the world, including Muslims.
From breaking bread with alienated Russian and Chinese leaders to shaking hands with Venezuela’s devil-hunting Chavez, Obama has gone where perhaps no US president has before. This is precisely why he has been rewarded with the Peace Nobel of course, in his first year in the White House. However, if you pause for a moment and look beyond what Obama says, we are still stuck where W. had left us a year ago. The chasm between this Cicero-like president’s rhetoric and reality of America’s policies and actions is as breathtaking as ever.
Obama’s soaring eloquence is yet to translate itself into action. The change Obama has promised us all has yet to manifest itself on the ground, in the Middle East and beyond. In fact, absurd as it might sound, America’s wars and empire project seem to be expanding under its Nobel laureate president.
WHILE Iraq and Afghanistan are still burning and Pakistan is hurtling down the precipice, the hawks at Pentagon and Capitol Hill are sharpening their claws for Yemen and Somalia. I agree, and I have myself gone to great lengths to emphasize that the mess America finds itself in today is not of Obama’s making. From Iraq to Afghanistan, and from the continuing horror in the Holy Land to the Guantanamo Bay, he has inherited everything from his predecessor. (God, will we ever get over Bush!) But how long can Obama’s ardent admirers and supporters, and that includes me, defend their hero with this fig leaf of logic? W., with his brigade of zealot supporters, is gone and is part of history.
Unfortunately, what’s happening today in Iraq, in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world is happening on President Obama’s watch. He may not like it but it’s past time he took responsibility for America’s policies and actions. We cannot go on blaming everything on Bush, especially when he isn’t around. Like it or not, President Obama has become a prisoner of America’s past. He’s left holding Bush’s baby — in Iraq, in Afghanistan-Pakistan and the Holy Land. Most ominously, in less than a year in office, Obama is beginning to sound and act more and more like the cowboy president.
On issues such as tackling Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he sees as the “epicenter of Al-Qaeda,” and on fighting the US war on terror around the world, our Captain Courageous is beginning to speak the language of the folks who have turned our world upside down. They are the people who have been firmly and effectively rejected by the US voters, gifting a historic mandate for “real and meaningful change” to a new leader.
This administration’s response and even the choice of words with regard to the latest alleged Al-Qaeda plot involving a Nigerian student and targeting a Detroit-bound flight sounds so eerily similar to that of the Bush administration after 9/11 attacks. The same jingoistic “Us Versus Them” rhetoric and attitude that have been at the heart of America’s current woes and its dangerous confrontation with the Islamic world persists. No mention anywhere, nary a fleeting thought to the sources that continue to fuel this conflict, sending wave after wave of desperate but determined men to attack America.
IT’S now established that the Nigerian underwear bomber and the Jordanian doctor Humam Khalil Al-Balawi, who blew himself up with eight CIA operatives in Afghanistan, were motivated by the suffering wrought by the lopsided US policies in the Middle East, especially its blind support for Israel. But who cares? Who wants this conflict to end even if it makes America, and the rest of the West, an inviting, sitting-duck target of extremists?
In fact, instead of learning from the recent US mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “bomb-them-to-the-Stone-Age” campaign of the US right has expanded now to target Pakistan, Iran and Yemen.
On the Palestine-Israel front, an initial burst of enthusiasm that generated euphoria and hopes around the world has given way to the same callous indifference in Washington that is so familiar to us. It seems Obama’s promise of “change we can” has crashed itself against the steely wall of lobbies and friends in high places that Israel has built around itself. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has the cheek to taunt and mock Obama’s much hyped peace initiative and unveils a new settlement on Palestinian land on a daily basis. But then what’s new? Obama is not the first US president who has surrendered himself before the almighty Israel at the first sign of resistance. And he won’t be the last.
Will this ever change? As Obama completes one year in White House next week, it is time for him to think long and hard where the US and the world are headed under his leadership. It’s still not over yet. He can still take charge of his administration and free it from the oppressive legacy he has inherited. Obama can still lead the world to the dawn of hope and peace that he once promised us. It would be an epic tragedy if he allows his vision and promise of change to die a silent, and unwept death in the cynical corridors of Washington and its labyrinth of lobbies and special interests. It’s now up to him to determine if he wants to perpetuate the legacy of war and oppression or leave behind a world that is more peaceful, secure and more just.
In his interview with People magazine this week, in which he rejected the talk of sending “US boots” into Yemen and Somalia, Obama talked of sending the “right message to the Muslim world.” It shows that he hasn’t totally given up on his vision and ideals. However, the real, right message that Obama could send the Islamic world is not by way of more sweet-sounding, nice words but by action. We are long past the time for rhetoric, Mr. President! It’s time for action — real, visible action, from Palestine to Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, they are all linked.
— Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Dubai-based commentator. Write to him at
