Barack Obama. What CAN I say? Well, I said this a few months ago — and got pilloried by liberals at home and abroad. Until, that is, lots of other people started saying it, too.
Obama is not Bush. Of course not. How could anyone compare to the great “decider“? Obama is, however, a disappointment. And the whole two-steps-forward-two-steps-back manoeuvring both frustrates and saddens me.
On the one hand, for example, he persuades Congress, against all odds, to pass an unprecedented (if incomplete and “centrist”) health-care reform bill, which will insure millions of uninsured Americans. And he boldly stands up to the Israeli right and humiliates the settlement-addicted Israeli premier, Binyamin Netanyahu, by “dumping him for dinner” during the latter’s visit to the White House.
On the other hand, he rewrites America’s policy on nuclear weapons and declares that the US will never use the bomb against a non-nuclear state — but reserves the right to nuke non-nuclear Iran. And, in an unprecedented legal move, he approves the “targeted killing”, or assassination, of a US citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
Two steps forward, two steps back. Deeply depressing.
Yet from liberals, and Obamaniacs, here in the UK and in the United States, there is either silence or there come feeble excuses. On the new nuclear posture, for example, Lisbeth Gronlund, co-director of the Global Security Programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “I think this is positive. Does it go far enough? No. But would it be possible for Obama to make the great leap we want? No.”
Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, said: “It could go further, faster, but it is the best we can hope for under the circumstances.”
“Best we can hope for”? I think that says it all.
And on the president’s endorsement of targeted killings, the silence is deafening. Obama gets a pass. There’s no other way to describe it. Can you imagine the reaction from liberals and leftists, and from the media as a whole, if George W Bush had targeted US citizens for execution from the air?
Yet the irony is that, according to the Guardian, “a former senior legal official in the Bush administration said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president”.
(Oh, and on a side note, before the neocon/Islamophobe trolls in the blogosphere start trying to smear me as an al-Awlaki supporter or defender, or as an apologist for Islamist violence or terror, please see here. My position on al-Awlaki is quite simple: I despise the man, but I don’t deny him the right to a fair trial. And nor, having read the US constitution, do I think that the executive branch of the US government has the right or authority to declare any US citizen guilty or not guilty without due process. See the peerless Glenn Greenwald for more details — and outrage.)
You can now follow me on Twitter.
Content from our partners
Related
