Now that Barack Obama is almost certain to be the Democratic Party’s nominee, those who want to believe he may change the United States’s foreign policy should turn to his pre-campaign biography. I don’t mean the recent Audacity of Hope, but Dreams From My Father, which he wrote in his early 30s.
In four tight pages Obama recounts his 1960s childhood in Jakarta with an Indonesian stepfather and a white mother. Working in the US embassy, she found herself alongside “caricatures of the ugly American, prone to making jokes about Indonesians until they found out she was married to one”.
Obama recalls how she picked up “things she couldn’t learn in the published news reports”: the role the CIA had just played in toppling the popular nationalist leader, Sukarno; the fact that half a million alleged communist sympathisers were murdered; the way the massacres were suppressed both by the regime and by terrified survivors. Obama was only six, but his mother later told him of her shock that “history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets”.
It’s a beautiful book. One wonders whether any would-be US president has been so good a writer. More importantly, has any other candidate grown up with such a direct encounter with a country under massive political repression or seen the cynical face of the US empire? The Republican nominee, John McCain, accuses Obama of not having national security “experience”, but what experiences have he or Clinton had which compare with Obama’s?
They were raised in the usual American cocoon of believing that the values behind the country’s anti-colonial beginnings still guide its international behaviour. Obama, by contrast, knows the US has run a global empire for at least the past half a century. His mother taught him, he writes, “to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterised Americans abroad”.
This awareness of how many people around the world see the US is the bedrock on which Obama’s approach to foreign policy is built. It is the opposite of the naive self-image of the US as a beacon on the hill.
It explains his principled opposition to the Iraq war from its inception. It underpins his criticism of Hillary Clinton’s threat to “obliterate” Iran if it considered attacking Israel. As he put it: “We have had a foreign policy of bluster and sabre-rattling and tough talk, and in the meantime have made a series of strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran … It is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we’re shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we’ve seen out of George Bush … This kind of language is not helpful.”
This does not mean Obama is a friend of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He calls him “reckless, irresponsible and inattentive” to the day-to-day needs of the Iranian people. He says the Iranian “regime is a threat to all of us” and supports sanctions to prevent it getting nuclear weapons. But, unlike Clinton, he criticises Washington’s refusal to have direct talks with Iran, as well as Cuba.
Over Israel, sadly, Obama has made large-scale compromises. He saw how Clinton, in an earlier vintage, was bullied by the pro-Israel lobby after embracing PLO chairperson Yasser Arafat’s wife. Since first bidding for a Senate seat from New York, she has become ultra-conservative on the issue.
Obama, too, has felt the pressure. After remarking in Iowa last year that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people”, he was accused by a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of not supporting Israel. Obama now uses an ingeniously expanded sentence: “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel.”
McCain may sneer that Hamas would cheer an Obama victory, but Obama’s line is hardly distinguishable from the present administration’s. The speech he made on race relations after the Jeremiah Wright issue erupted was widely regarded as a brilliant analysis of the psychology of black churches.
But it included an alarming phrase that described the Middle East’s longest conflict not in terms of land and forced displacement but as one in which Israel is an innocent victim of outside forces. Obama denounced Wright for having a “view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam”.
This year David Harris, director of the American Jewish Committee, was quoted in The New York Times as wondering: “Does Obama feel Israel in his kishkas?” (the Yiddish word for gut). This sets the bar especially high, or low. Scrutiny now has to focus on candidates’ entrails as well as their minds.
But Obama has been working hard to oblige. In the current crisis over Gaza, he echoes the Israeli government’s line. Before Clinton or McCain, he came out against a proposed United Nations Security Council statement that would have expressed concern about the Israeli blockade. He describes Israel’s siege as “forced” by the Palestinian rocket attacks.
Although he repeatedly outlines a general principle that the US should talk to every important player without preconditions, he does not apply this in the Middle East. In 2006 Obama blamed Hizbullah for the war with Israel and did not join the appeals for Israel to accept a ceasefire. Last month he criticised Jimmy Carter for talking to Hamas.
So the big questions remain: does Obama really want to change US foreign policy and can he, if he does? Having a black person in the Oval Office, and especially one with an understanding of US imperialism, would have a colossal international impact in itself. But would this merely result in even greater disappointment once the months go by and US policy stays the same? In my kishkas I feel Obama is our best hope. In my mind I prepare for business as usual.
Edwards backs Obama
Barack Obama received a huge boost on his way to the Democratic nomination this week when he beat off Hillary Clinton to secure the endorsement of their former rival, John Edwards, writes Ewen MacAskill. The announcement helped to offset Obama’s defeat at the hands of Clinton in the West Virginia primary, one of his worst results since the Democratic nomination contest began, on January 3.
Edwards, who was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2004, pulled out of the race in January and has since been energetically courted by both Clinton and Obama since. His strength is his appeal to blue-collar white voters, the demographic group Obama has been struggling to win over. Edwards fought his campaign on an anti-poverty platform.
Clinton’s campaign chairperson, Terry McAuliffe, responded: “We respect John Edwards, but as the voters of West Virginia showed last night, this thing is far from over.”
Despite Clinton’s campaign being $20-million in debt, McAuliffe said she had the resources to compete with Obama.
Edwards potentially brings with him a further 12 delegates, won in the early stages of the primary, who may now follow his lead by throwing their Democratic convention votes behind Obama.
The scale of Obama’s problem in attracting the white working class was reinforced in West Virginia, one of the poorest states in the country and overwhelmingly white, which Clinton won by 67% to 26%. The victory gave her 20 delegates to his eight. Despite that, he continued to close in on the 2 026 magic number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination.
Obama announced support from another handful of superdelegates this week, who took him to within 133 delegates of the 2 026 target. He has 1 893 to Clinton’s 1Â 718.
But Clinton insisted she would stay in the race until the final primaries — South Dakota and Montana — on June 3, bringing to an end an epic 56 contests that began in Iowa on January 3. But Obama may meet the magic number before then.
Edwards, who has been mulling his decision since January, did not even tell many of his former top advisers because he wanted to make sure that he personally spoke to Clinton to give her the news.
David Saunders, a former Edwards campaign adviser, said the timing of the endorsement could not have been better, given Obama’s loss in West Virginia.
“For Barack Obama, I think he ought to kiss Johnny Edwards on the lips to kill this 41-point loss,” he added. “The story is not going to be the 41-point loss, it’s going to be Edwards’s endorsement.”
Obama, working on the assumption that he has beaten Clinton for the Democratic nomination, this week switched his focus from the remaining five primaries to the November election for the White House against Republican John McCain.
He spent the day talking to blue-collar workers in Michigan, one of the key swing states in the November election, including Ohio Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Edwards’s support for Obama may be crucial in winning over that constituency. — Â