Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

The news that Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize travelled around the world today like wildfire. Obama said he was surprised that he had been chosen. I’ll go one better and say that I’m positively flabbergasted.

It seems that one can now be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of words alone. After all, Obama talks about peace at every opportunity, but what has he actually done to achieve it? Aren’t peace prizes supposed to recognise, oh, you know, actual achievements?

The Nobel committee applauded Obama’s approach of considered international diplomacy and the willingness to make concessions along the way. Whilst these qualities are, indeed, uncommon traits in American leaders, they’re not unusual per se. it does therefore seem as if Obama is being rewarded for the sheer contrast of his presidency with that of his predecessor. Eight years of idiocy, lies and greed from Bush and his cohorts continue to make Obama look better than he really is.

Obama’s approach to international diplomacy is nothing new. Certainly, it’s new for the usually belligerent, unilaterally operating nation over which he presides, but at a global level, one has to wonder why, if the bar is set so low, no other Western leader has received a Nobel prize in recent years. After all, they, too, have waxed lyrical about peace and freedom, urged for talks and emphasised the need for the all nations to share in the responsibility of building a safer world for us all to live in. I’m not suggesting that they also deserved a prize; I’m saying that they didn’t, and neither did Obama.

Looking beyond the poetic speechwriters’ prose, let’s look at a couple of things that Obama has actually done this year to influence peace:

• He has deployed an extra 21,000 troops in Afghanistan and is currently considering committing a further 40,000.

• He has refused to cut military aid to Israel, in spite of the knowledge that Israel repeatedly uses arms manufactured in the US to commit gross human rights violations, as independently determined by Amnesty International.

Those two facts a lone make a mockery of Obama’s being awarded a Peace Prize. Robert Mugabe must be waiting in the wings for a 2010 nomination.

Being seen to broker peace whilst arming one side of the conflict is the kind of hypocritical currency with which observers of US foreign policy are all too familiar. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Obama isn’t so very different from his predecessors.

In his favour, he is vastly more eloquent and charming. Add to that the fact that he has come along at a time when the American public have never been more desperate to believe in something, and his meteoric rise seems all but inevitable. That the gullible, television-fed masses of America are helpless, willing fodder for Obama’s hollow promise of a better world is one thing, but shouldn’t we expect a more considered verdict from a Nobel committee?

Perhaps not. These same people hand-picked Al Gore for the same prize just a few years ago.

At best, this award is a prize of encouragement, an expression of hope. It’s to say: you’re on the right track; we like what you’re doing; please continue. It’s not a reward for any achievement already banked.

To Obama’s credit, he recognises that his goals, not his achievements, are being rewarded and states that he feels ill at ease having his name mentioned in the same breath as some of the previous recipients of the prize. He feels his name doesn’t sit well next to theirs. On that much, at least, Obama and I can agree.

Obama has said he will donate the prize money associated with the award to a good cause. One can only hope he doesn’t choose to add it to the Israeli military aid budget.

Far be it from me to withhold credit where it’s due, so without the slightest reservation, I hereby commend Obama for the following deeds:

• Ordering the closure of the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay (although it’s still outrageous that he’s given them a year to do so). The existence of that place is an abomination and makes any claim to having a free society absurd.

• Ordering the cessation of torture by the US military. Again, civilised countries do not torture (or put to death, for that matter) their prisoners. There’s no word yet on capital punishment and I’m not holding my breath.

• Ordering the cessation of secret CIA rendition flights to transport foreign nationals, kidnapped by the US, to CIA-operated prisons in foreign states, where they were subject to torture. You remember these flights, don’t you? They’re the ones Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s defence minister, denied had ever took place. Odd that Obama feels the need to put a stop to something that never happens.

• Ordering the closure of the aforementioned secret CIA prisons in foreign states.

I must admit, I’m pleasantly surprised by the extent and promptness of some of the above actions.

On the other hand, he told Hamas to end their rocket fire into Israel, but urged Israel only to reopen its border with Gaza. Nothing short of a full condemnation of Israel’s recent actions is acceptable, together with an immediate of US military aid.

Obama also pledged his support for efforts to prevent Hamas from rearming, which is excruciatingly hypocritical, given his country’s continued military aid to the other side. You can’t claim to support the peace process whilst continuing to arm one of the warring factions.

But like I say, credit where credit’s due, even if it is only a drop in a very deep ocean.

Did you see the unveiling of the emperor’s new clothes on television yesterday?

I caught only some of it, but I marvelled at the masses, awestruck and unable to see that their new emperor was as naked as they day he was born.

I was surprised that Jesus Christ himself didn’t put in an appearance. You’d almost have expected him to, given the level of rapture that was present. He probably didn’t want to be upstaged by the people’s new messiah.

The new saviour evidently brings salvation from a sordid history of slavery for the blacks and liberation from generations of hereditary guilt for the whites. Everyone’s a winner; except for Afghanistan, Palestine; and anyone else who stands in the way.

At the end of the day, when the rose-tinted spectacles are removed, there’s nothing but rhetoric and histrionics. Only this time, it’s met by blind faith and blinkers by the masses.

Desperate people want nothing more than something all-consuming to believe in, a sense that there’s something more to life than their own insignificant existence. That’s why prison inmates are susceptible to religious conversion and it’s why so many people are now entranced by the lure of an erudite man with half a brain. He represents hope, and for many people, the absence of hope is something with which they cannot cope.

The fact remains: the emperor has no clothes.

Neither Barack Obama nor Hilary Clinton have ever enjoyed much credibility in these quarters, but I do continue to be surprised by the extent to which their supporters exhibit selective blindness when performing critical analysis of their actions.

Obama is set to announce Clinton as his Minister of Foreign Affairs (or Secretary of State, as it’s called in the US). On the face of it, it’s a curious choice.

Obama previously criticised Clinton for her support of Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. Of course, she immediately withdrew her support once public opinion swung the other way, but back when the American public was still being led up the garden path with fairy tales of Iraq being an Al Qaida hotbed, she was as vocal as anyone about the absolute necessity of invading Iraq.

Clinton, on the other hand, whilst campaigning for the Democratic party presidential nomination, criticised Obama for being naive, inexperienced and generally not up to the job of president. She also condemned him for his willingness to sit down without preconditions and talk to the likes of Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.

So, you could conclude that she doesn’t exactly see eye to eye with Obama on foreign policy, but she’s still prepared to work under him as the Secretary of State? Isn’t that a little disingenuous?

It’s not as strange as it seems, of course. You just have to remember that most politicians are duplicitous, conniving megalomaniacs with only their own interest at heart. Then it all starts to make sense.

Clinton has a history of modifying her stance on anything and everything in order to increase her popularity with the general public, thereby improving her chances of career advancement. If the sum of 2 + 2 was a hot political issue and she believed the result to be 4, you can rest assured that her public statements would repeatedly emphasise that the result was, in fact, 5, if that’s what her advisors were telling her the unwashed masses wanted to hear.

Taking the job with Obama, therefore, is nothing more than cynical self-interest. Even if she considers Obama to be an incompetent baboon, there’s no way she’d ever turn down a chance to occupy a powerful office like that. It’s all about the power, you see. Political ambition is all she has left in her vacuous life.

And what does Obama now have to say about Clinton, a woman who voted to send her country headlong into an unwinnable war in Iraq without even first demanding to see the evidence the proponents of said war claimed would unequivocally justify their actions?

He says this: “She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world’s leaders, who will command respect in every capital, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world.”

It’s hard to know how a woman who can support starting a war without caring to see the evidence that would supposedly justify it can command anyone’s complete confidence, much less that of the man about to run the world’s most powerful country.

In fact, what’s the worst possible job you could imagine giving to someone whose judgement has already been demonstrated to be woefully, negligently bad? Minister for Foreign Affairs, is the one that springs to my mind.

Not only does Obama have bad foreign policy, he now has an equally bad foreign minister to enact it. You can at least give the man credit for a perverse consistency, I suppose.

Watch out, Afghanistan. The next four years are going to be harsh.

The United States of America have a new president, a black man, and many people are calling this a historic event. “If this can be achieved, anything is possible”, is an oft heard quote from Americans during the past 24 hours.

Well, if that’s true, we can look forward to future elections being won by:

• a woman

• an unmarried person

• an atheist

• a Muslim

• a homosexual

• a pacifist

For the sake of your health, don’t hold your breath.

I belong to a seemingly very small minority of world denizens who see little significance in the fact that Obama is a black man. I find the colour of his skin utterly irrelevant.

In fact, I find any detail you care to mention about the man himself irrelevant, except for his intelligence. One is, after all, electing an office more than the individual himself. If Obama dies whilst in office, another party member will take over the reins and enact the same policies, so it makes sense to look only at the party politics themselves. I find that many, if not most, Americans lose sight of this and are distracted by the individual politicians, their personality, charisma and manner.

Looking just at the politics, then, I see little reason for hope in Obama’s foreign policy. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Under Obama, the US will still not be subordinate to the UN. Unilateral force will continue to be applied overseas, if deemed appropriate by the US.

There’s virtually no chance of the US joining the International Criminal Court, either, so there’s no chance of holding the country’s leaders internationally accountable for their crimes abroad.

Military aid to Israel will continue under Obama, which amounts to an implicit approval of Israel’s continuing acts of aggression, occupation and oppression.

The war in Afghanistan will be stepped up, costing untold numbers of lives in that country. Obama sees Afghanistan as the prime front against terrorism, but fails to understand that much of that same terrorism has its origin in brutal US foreign policy over the last 50 years. When others, such as the very vocal Jeremiah Wright, point this out, they are decried and denounced for statements that are “offensive to every American”. The truth hurts.

We can hope, at least, that Obama will do some good within his own country. Perhaps under Obama, the standard of education and health care for Americans will improve. Anything that can be done to raise the general level of awareness in America that the country is not alone in the world and cannot endlessly continue to use the rest of the world as its own private, vast resource pool without incurring the wrath of many, has to be a good thing.

The wake-up call of 9/11 was a painful opportunity for some much needed introspection, but that call was not heeded. Obama doesn’t understand (or can’t politically be seen to acknowledge) that most anti-American terrorism is born of a desire for retribution, not blind hatred. Better education and presumed consequent increased global awareness amongst the voting populace of America are perhaps the only hope for a more peaceful world, even if they take years to yield any observable fruit.