Obama's test and ours

Remember what Gore Vidal said about John McCain, that he was stupid even by American standards. Which is why I secretly hoped, against all the evidence, that McCain should win because we could have done with another idiot in the White House.

George Bush's great historic achievement was his mighty contribution to the decline of American power. The overwhelming arch of American global hegemony – when we started talking of America as the sole superpower – which became visible when the Soviet Union disintegrated, began to dip, sooner than anyone could have expected, with Bush's ascension to power.

America's global dominance spawned a particular breed of ideological terrorists whom the world got to know as neo-conservatives. These ideologists, who would have been in a mental asylum any other time, had us believe that this was going to be the American century. If that dominance seems not so assured today, it is thanks in large measure to the arrogance, hubris and sheer stupidity of the Bush years which saw the first cracks appearing in the façade of the American empire.

So to keep this trajectory going, to see a further decline in American power which would have been good for all of us – nature itself preferring a balance in everything – McCain would have been a disaster for America but a boon for the rest of the world.

In a remarkable display of collective stupidity the United States, after all, had elected George Bush as president in 2000. And it had marched to war on flaky evidence in 2001 and then to another war on totally cooked-up grounds in 2003. The lies to justify these wars were such outright forgeries that high school kids, with a bit of intelligence, could have seen through them.

But America, the greatest power on earth, chose, collectively, not to see. Instead it opted for a renunciation of reason and common sense and marched to the drumbeats of those two phoney wars spearheaded by such icons as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (remember him?) who if America was not a superpower would be tried as war criminals.

Mohammad Ata and his companions, the terrorists who flew their hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, could have hardly foreseen the consequences. For what they did set the strongest nation on earth on a path of collective madness that would lead to Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the rewriting of torture rules and the subverting of American civil liberties.

Whereas the neo-cons thought they were about to rewrite history, redraw the map of the Middle East and ensure unchallenged American global supremacy for another hundred years, their attempt at rewriting history managed to abort the American century just when it had begun.

These ideological hit-men made a bogey of Islam when they would have done much better to examine some of their own messianic beliefs. Many of them were Christian fundamentalists, not least Bush himself who, as reported by then Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath, famously told a Palestinian delegation in 2003: "I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did."

Given this record of America suffering fools for its leaders it wouldn't have been out of place for McCain to have been elected president. But going against the weirdo trend of the last eight years America has gone and elected a thoughtful and intelligent man, who is everything that the Bush-Cheney gang was not. Good for America certainly but whether good for the rest of the world we will have to wait and see.

For the danger of an intelligent man as American president is that by recasting American policy, or at least changing its emphasis, and winding down the two imperial wars in which America is caught and which are costing a great deal of treasure and sapping American strength, he will arrest the decline of American prestige if not power across the globe. Whether this necessarily will be a good thing depends on one's views about how the world should be balanced or textured. The unipolar world we have seen since 1989 has not been a force for good. It has fed American arrogance and wrought much havoc. We don't want more of it, do we?

John F Kennedy was a thoughtful and intelligent man and as articulate and eloquent as Obama. His victory in 1960 was greeted with as much rapture as Obama's victory now. Yet Kennedy's all too short stay at the helm was marked by a deeper American involvement in Vietnam. He should have got his country out of that mess. But the best and brightest of that generation were sold on what they took to be the verities of Vietnam. It was only when the going got more tough and a student revolt erupted on American campuses that the US started having second thoughts about an enterprise which apart from inflicting deep wounds on America's psyche brought much misery to the Vietnamese people and, as a side-effect, destroyed Cambodia.

Obama's test will come soon enough. America is not winning in Iraq and the tide is far from turning but the stalemate that has developed there is being hailed as a victory of sorts. This situation favours a gradual disengagement which is what Obama wants to: a winding down of the Iraq war. But what about that other theatre of American hubris, Afghanistan? Here we are on tricky ground because Obama favours not a withdrawal from Afghanistan but a greater focus which translated into military terms means a Kennedy-esque escalation. This spells trouble for Pakistan.

We are already in the eye of the storm and are being made a scapegoat for American failure to defeat the Taliban and pacify Afghanistan. The Taliban are still around and Obama's victory won't make Mullah Omar and his cohorts disappear into the mountains. General Petraeus, the new CENTCOM commander, has been credited with success, or whatever passes for success in Iraq. With Obama downgrading Iraq and upgrading Afghanistan, and Gen Petraeus having a reputation to uphold, we are likely to see the Afghan situation getting worse before it gets better.

A weak government holds sway in Islamabad, a government which has just made a mockery of itself and the country by creating an army of ministers (55 at latest count, which makes it amongst the heaviest cabinets anywhere in the world). This at a time of acute financial distress when national economic policy has come down to flashing our iron begging bowl before the averted eyes of all and sundry.

Is this government in any position to resist American pressure to draw us further into the war along our Afghan border which is a spillover from America's war in Afghanistan but which America insists we call our war?

Gen Petraeus was recently in Islamabad, in fact one of his first ports of call after assuming the CENTCOM command. The photos of his meetings in Islamabad deserve careful scrutiny as his manner and smile – he was smiling on all occasions – were an exercise in imperial condescension.

Here he is with Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar who apart from looking clearly out of his depth is trying bravely to smile but looks ill at ease. Here he is with Prime Minister Gilani, not just holding him by the hand but, in a gesture meant to be courteous but which becomes condescending, holding on to his shoulder with his other hand. The prime minister too is trying bravely to smile and manages to look ill at ease.

The Bush White House was crude, 'you are either with us or against us' summing up its philosophy. The Obama team promises to be smooth and subtle. Out of the mess that we have in Islamabad can we dredge up matching smoothness and subtlety? That's the test facing Pakistan and its iron begging bowl.



Email: winlust@yahoo.com