CGNorena Weekly

Obama, Afghanistan and Beyond

I have been an Obama supporter from day one; I am still one now, more than ever. However, Obama has made some statements on Afghanistan that truly bother me.

During the primaries – which are mercifully over—Obama liked to repeat that America is involved in two wars: the war in Iraq, which we should have never started; and the war in Afghanistan, which we have not won yet.  I have no qualms with his thought on Iraq, but I have disturbing misgivings about his words on Afghanistan.

Obama seems to assume that, unlike Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan was fully justified because of the 9/11 disaster. Such manner of thinking presupposes that Afghanistan was directly and mostly responsible as a nation  for  the tragedy of that day. It was not, not as much as our “allies” Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, or even Egypt are, all of which share some responsibility for the attack.  It is true that bin Laden was hiding in some caves (where he belongs, anyhow) in northeastern Afghanistan.  But he moved into other caves in the tribal areas of Waziristan, Musharraf’s haven in northwestern Pakistan. He is still there.

What bothers me about Obama’s words is that they still seem to reflect President Bush’s distorted world-view, a view I thought was about to be changed.  It just terrifies me to think that Obama wants American soldiers to bring the Afghanistan war to victory, a victory that will prove as elusive as in Iraq. Pakistan alone can provide thousands of suicide bombers for years to come. Such “American war” would unfortunately make Obama’s presidency a Bush Third Term in foreign policy, as much (or potentially much worse) as a MacCain presidency would. Most Americans would not tolerate another American war against an Islamic nation in the name of American national security. Obama, if elected this fall, would be doomed to be a one-term president.

Therange of American diplomacy, should be anchored in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and take into account the big powers that still dominate the entire region. Russia, that provoked the jihad against her troops in Afghanistan, still attempts to manipulate the republics of Central Asia (more of this later). The new President of Russia, Mr. Medvedey, might not be as fiercely opposed to American influence in the region as Mr. Putin has been.

Turkey, the model of a secularized Islamic society in transition, will for years to come affect the destinies of those Central Asia republics that are in a similar stage of secularization (such as Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan) or are dominated by Turkmen as a distinct ethno-linguistic group (such as Turkmenistan), or whose language is Turkic (such as Kazakhstan). Tajikistan, which was for centuries part of the Persian Empire, has close cultural relations with Iran. Both India and China have no qualms in making public their interest in the vast oil and gas reserves, particularly those in Kazakhstan.

The republics of Central Asia have some features in common and some very distinctive characteristics. All of them are land-locked former Soviet provinces that reached independence from the Soviet Union in the last decade of the 20th century, and are generally speaking, ignored by Americans.  In all of them independence was followed by more or less corrupt rulers and, as a reaction to them, by a rapid growth of radical Islam imported mostly from the Afghan Taliban at first and then by bin Laden’s  al-Qaeda. They are all Sunni Moslems, but there are also scattered minorities of Diaspora Jews, Nestorian Christians, and some Sufis.

Some of them are huge and wealthy, and some are small and impoverished.  Kazakhstan is the largest–larger than all of western Europe—and the richest: the republic holds about 4 billion tons of proven recoverable oil reserves and about 8 billion barrels of natural gas. The country is also rich in uranium, chromium, lead, zinc, manganese, copper, coal, iron, gold and diamonds. Tajikistan is the smallest, but it has great hydropower potential.

Some of the republics, such as Kazakhstan, have a respectable political structure and a well managed monetary policy while seeking good relations with Russia, China, the United States and the European Union: an ideal stage for a “surge” of American diplomacy in the near future. Tolerance to other societies has become a part of Kazakh culture. The government provides scholarship funds to Oxford and to some American Ivy League universities. American scholars, oil technicians, economists, contractors to build the pipes badly needed to bring oil and gas to market, will play a decisive role in the future of Kazakhstan. The impact of Islamic radicalism has so far been substantially blunted in Kazakhstan

Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights. Inflation after independence reached a galloping 1,000% per year, but a highly protectionist policy and the profitable export of cotton and gold have stabilized the situation. Nearly 90% of the population—half of the region’s total population (almost 28 million) is Sunni Muslim. Uzbekistan has the largest military force in Central Asia. For a while (until 2005), Uzbekistan approved a request for the US military use of some air bases and supported American war against global terrorism. Recently, though, Uzbekistan has tilted toward Russia and increased its isolationism from the West. Unfortunately, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (the IMU) has enjoyed the clandestine support of bin Laden and the Taliban.. If the work of American diplomats looks promising in Kazakhstan, it promises to be a tough job in Uzbekistan.

Two other countries, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, are less populated and far less disturbed by political unrest. Turkmenistan is mostly a sub-tropical desert that will probably provide routes toward the Caspian Sea for the oil pipes of the future, as it provided the land for the Silk Route in the past.   Kyrgyzstan, “the Switzerland of Central Asia,“ will most likely become an idyllic and beautiful tourist resort for Europeans, Indians, Chinese, and the everywhere present Japanese and American tourists. Not a bad place to make “global” friends.

In these nations, whose names we are beginning to learn without ever being sure about how they are spelled, an important part of contemporary history will be written. American college students who care about humanity, have the moral obligation to become acquainted with them, eager to become part of their future. The war in Afghanistan is not going to be “won” by more American boots on the ground, but it could and should be decisively affected by a friendly, constructive, intelligent, unselfish, and peaceful  “surge” of new Americans. This is the change “we can believe in.” Obama’s flight to the center has to go straight to the center of Asia.

Islam experts think that, globally speaking, Muslim societies (with more than one billion of mostly peaceful Islam believers) will yield to the advances of western secularism, as Ataturk’s Turkey did after the First World War. The American role is to bring about that day as soon as possible everywhere. More army brigades will not help much, but American diplomats and American young people have a glorious responsibility in their hands. Was not something like this what Obama promised to America?

America is not supposed to “win” the war in Afghanistan all by herself. An international force of Kazakhs, Pakistanis, Afghanistanis, Turks, British, Canadians, Indonesians, etc should see to it that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is closed to terrorists from both sides and the opium trade does not go to pay for suicide bombers in Madrid, London or Bali. The capture of bin Laden would be the laurel of those who prevail. It might take a few years of diplomatic surge, but humanity mandates the effort.

Greed and Capitalism

As everybody knows capitalism is based upon the apparently simple transaction of borrowing money from a lender who is confident the borrower will pay back the same amount (the principal) plus a certain premium  (interest). For centuries the transaction was morally questioned by religious moralists (first Christian and later Muslim) who objected to the central idea of making money out of lending money to others. Lenders who charged an excessive interest were generally condemned as money mongers. Eventually –at least in the western world—the operation became not only fully legitimate, but the driving force of modern capitalism.

Borrowing and lending are closely linked with buying and selling. Most borrowers use the money they borrow to buy what they need or what they want.  Lending itself is a kind of selling.   Sellers sell the use of the money they have to earn more money for themselves.

People borrow money to buy big items they could not otherwise pay for in cash, such as automobiles, and, far more importantly, the houses they plan to live in. Buying a house is for most Americans the biggest monetary transaction of their life, almost always eighty times bigger than buying a new automobile. In most cases, buyers do not buy directly from the owners of the house, but through real estate agents who act as brokers between the buyers and the owners and the banks.

In our days buying a house involves a number of professionals and public agencies that expect to make a lot of money for themselves. Here is a simple list:
    A real estate agent who is in most cases obliged to share the opportunity with other members of the same profession in the same locality. This sharing greatly expands the publicity of the possible transaction. Real estate agents try to sell the  house at the highest but realistic price. Setting the house’s price is the first opportunity for human greed to make its presence felt: it combines the greed of the seller and the greed of the real estate person, whose fee is normally 6% of the price of the house sold. The first people to benefit from an inflationary rise of housing prices are the real estate agents.
    -Agreeing on the price of the property to be sold involves two other professionals: a licensed appraiser of its value, and a public inspector who guarantees that the property complies (or not) with all the local construction codes. The activities of appraisers are barely regulated by local or state laws; inspectors are much more regulated. The more people are involved in the deal, the more room is opened for questionable conflicts of interest. If the appraiser is a friend of the seller, he or she will be tempted to overestimate the value of the property. In the same situation, the inspector might become blind to the deficiencies of the building, to the repairs that are imperative before the sale takes place  before the first big rain comes along or the first strong earthquake pays a visit to the town.

Up to this point the self-interest of all the participants tends to safeguard in most cases the basic impartiality of the whole deal. In fact, early capitalists wrote about “an invisible hand” that maintains in equilibrium the interplay of the selfish motivations of all the individuals involved. This manner of thinking was later raised to the point of professing an almost unshakable faith in the liberty and self-regulating character of the markets, a character that abhors the unwarranted intrusion of the state regulatory power. To conservative economists a regulated economy necessarily brings on an unwarranted diminution of individual liberty.

The sub prime mortgage crisis of 2008 – one of the mot serious crisis in American financial history—has forced us to reflect on its dynamics.  The Bush administration has always believed that the vitality of the American economy depends basically on the willingness of the consumer to spend, in most cases by borrowing money. The mechanisms of borrowing have multiplied with the use of credit cards, equity loans,  the normal buying of stocks, bonds and other securities, or by paying installments. No other society in human history has borrowed more money than America today. As a result, the accumulation of debt at all levels (individual debt, local debt, state debt, national debt, foreign debt) has reached numbers that simply defy the imagination.

The American housing industry was no exception to this trend, in fact it was a trend setter. When President Bush spoke in glowing terms about “a national culture of ownership,” he meant mostly housing ownership. Soon the boundaries between people trying to find a home for the family and rich speculators (who had already one or two mansions) trying to invest in houses became very fuzzy. The “hot” housing industry gradually moved from the offices of real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and local banks, into the halls of Wall Street. Buying a house was the investment of the day. The housing prices kept spiraling up. Home owners found themselves with huge home equities inviting further loans. With home equity loans they bought houses that had been poorly maintained, bought them at a bargain price, refurbished them with new kitchen counters, fixed up the modest bathrooms, hired up an illegal immigrant to embellish the garden, put in some copper pipes, and quickly put the house up for sale. They bought cheap and sold high.  Although this housing bubble showed the unequivocal signs of an “irrational exuberance” (as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank confessed), nobody moved in a significant way to provide the needed restraints. The ambition of the buyer/investor ran amok.
Soon the borrowers who had exaggerated their incomes or their hopes of job promotions, found themselves unable to pay their mortgages. Few of then plainly admitted that the house they were panning to buy was not a primary residence for themselves, but a second (or third)  house, most likely to be rented or sold as quickly as possible. Lenders exploited all the possibilities of “teaser loans,” loans with and adjustable rate of the interest. Few borrowers were transparently told that “adjustable” meant in most cases, that the rate of interest was “raised.” Rating agencies concealed the weaknesses of the borrowers’ credit, a rating that was nothing but a statistical information about the paying back the debt of a pool of investors in similar conditions. The rating grade was clearly more than information for the possible buyer; it became a marketing or even an advertising device, an open recommendation to buy. The approval of the loan by a bank was the ideal time to share some champagne for bank managers, the real estate agents, and the more or less “innocent” buyers. People of modest income who badly needed a home were not able to play the game; they just went back to their one-bedroom rentals and felt sorry for themselves. I know of many families who were forced to move to another state simply because they could not afford housing in California.

President Bush’s “pride of ownership” was painfully limited and artfully concealed to a small group of older home-owners who were  mortgage-free, only 30% of the so called “home-owners.” Most American houses, like most SUV’s, belonged to the bank.

In trying to find the causes of the immense credit crisis that has brought a serious slowdown to markets everywhere in the world (not in the same degree) one should try to find who were the people or institutions who benefited most from the “irrational exuberance” of the uncontrolled expansion of credit, and who were the people who suffered most from its demise. Banks and lenders have lost millions; individual home-owners have lost or are losing their homes.  Banks and lenders were the big powers in the game; the owners who  had to sign the foreclosure on “their” homes, were the pathetic victims. This final judgment should not surprise any one who has observed the Bush administration or the final decisions of today’s Supreme Court: the real losers are in most cases the weak parties to the conflict.

No wonder that young new voters in the presidential election stand firmly on the side of those who demand real change at all levels of our national life.  By instinct they know that a sober amount of greed is essential to the survival of democratic capitalism. But they also know that “irrational” greed can bring about the doom of the entire system. America will survive the present recession only if economists admit that irrational credit expansions can and must be controlled by reasonable “regulatory intrusions.” An irrational expansion of credit threatens its very existence and reliability. An excessive pride of ownership can bring about the demise of liberal capitalism as we know it.

The Ups and Downs of the Journey to a More Perfect Union

Nobody said that the journey to “a more perfect union” the American Constitution promised all of us would always be pleasurable or beautiful. To begin with, the very concept of “a more perfect union” is in itself a difficult one to comprehend. How can a union that is perfect become better?

More than a thousand years before the American Constitution was written, Saint Augustine reminded us that “the perfection of this life is nothing more than the attempt to be perfect.” The very attempts to perfection, however, do not always represent a move toward it nor are in themselves pleasurable or beautiful.

In the last two weeks of the Democratic presidential primaries the world has been exposed to some vistas of American political life that have all the beauty of garbage in the kitchen sink. It all began with a slightly misguided step taken by the frontrunner in the race toward the nomination of the Democratic party, Senator Obama. He simply forgot that whatever he would say in public would sooner or later (rather sooner than later) be given the worst possible interpretation. What he said in public was that folks in the “small towns” of Pennsylvania were “bitter” at their government, and that as a result they were “clinging” to their own traditions, such as “guns and religion.”

The Clintons’ reaction to those words was an explosion of contrived indignation, a reaction that spread through the American media withquestionable unanimity and force. One could not help but to smell the hideous stench of a poorly disguised trace of racist feeling hiding deep among the worst “angels of our nature.” The stalemate Obama spoke about in his historical speech on race had been broken. American pundits of all labels—the Brooks, the Shields, the Kristols, the Krugmans , etc—joined in the ritual act of communal condemnation; the only male black candidate to the Presidency of the United States in history was being intellectually lynched for everybody to see.

We should admit that one has to make an effort of good will to explain Obama’s reference to guns. The most benign interpretation is to say that what he meant was that rural people “in small towns” like to go hunting for a distraction from the terrible headlines on the newspapers and in television. Hunting, in this view, is mainly an escape from the terrible things Obama would like to change.  Obama’s critics point out with some justification that hunting is a legitimate activity that is not by any means the exclusive property of farmers in “small towns” (remember our mellow Vice President) nor often a simple distraction from the political mess of our days. The reference to “small towns’ might be slightly condescending but not bad enough to exclude somebody form the race to the White House.

The problem with the mention of “guns’” in juxtaposition with “religion” is admittedly more difficult to explain.  It is almost impossible to imagine what one could say what is that taking a gun for hunting ducks and holding religious beliefs share in common. Does Obama think that what moves people to kill ducks is roughly the same as what impels them to believe in the existence of a personal God who punishes sin and rewards virtue in an afterlife?  The Senator is far too intelligent to even think about such nonsense.

To complicate the situation, these irritating statements were made in San Francisco, the Sodom and Gomorrah of America according to the Neo-cons of the Christian Right. That is why the holier-than-thou severe judges of Mr. Obama did not hesitate to accuse him of elitism, condescendence, and arrogance. One can fear, they said, all those vices from a candidate to the Presidency of the United States that is irresponsible enough to refuse to wear on his lapel the glorious flag of beautiful America. But that is not all. Some of the people who intellectually lynched Obama did not hesitate to maintain that his statements were inspired by – are your ready ? – Marx himself!

Let me elaborate on this. Marx was the first philosopher to teach that human beings are “alienated” (namely “estranged, “ bitter and frustrated) in society not because they are religious, but that they are religious because they are alienated in society. But Obama never said that. He simply said that the political deceptions and abuses of the day compel some human beings to “cling” to religion as the one reliable, constant, value of their earthly existence. The bitterness Obama spoke about is not the cause of religious belief, but the transient reinforcement of it by the fear of imminent death on the streets of Baghdad or the panic of losing your home or your job or your pension or your health insurance. Bill Clinton –most likely one of the main agent provocateurs of last week’s furor against Obama- was so freaked out by the whole situation that he did not hesitate to tell Americans that rather than feeling bitter they should be proud of their  being deceived, betrayed, and abandoned by the present administration.” Excessive anger obviously inspires ridiculous thoughts.

What is most amazing and encouraging about this sad episode is that apparently most American people have refused to be unduly impressed by it. The sober, fair, prudent and discreet majority of Americans have taken all the verbiage of Obama’s critics as shocking evidence of what linguists think is the first condition of mutual understanding in human discourse: a certain reserve of charity. If you are predisposed not to like what your partners in conversation have to say, most likely you will not be able to understand a word they say. Understanding each other presupposes some benevolent attitude in those who do the talking and the listening.

The better angels of American nature have prevailed: Obama seems still ahead in the national polls. We are moving closer to a “more perfect Union.”

Globalization: Why is the USA blamed for many of its failures?

One of the main goals of globalization is to help the development of the world’s poorest countries. Yet, when the leaders of globalization convene anywhere in the world- be it Davos, Montevideo, or Denver– protests erupt in a most violent manner. Without exception, the protesters are mostly young or citizens of poor nations. Their unequivocal message is that globalization sacrifices the local interests of their underdeveloped countries to the corporate interest of the rich industrial nations, particularly the United States of America. When President Bush attends those meetings, his plane lands in a distant airport, a helicopter transfers him to a remote mansion near a city where the traffic is diverted from his path, and the streets are crowded with more Marines than you can find at Camp Pendleton. The protesters do not like America. No matter what Bush keeps on saying, it is becoming increasingly dangerous to be an American in 2008.

There has never been an economic policy that did not hurt some people and benefit others. Globalization, as any human institution, is no exception to that rule. The problem is that, according to many experts, globalization hurts mostly the very people it intended to help: poverty in the world has significantly increased, even in rich countries with a constantly increasing GDP, even in the American empire, a rich country with many, many poor people. The rich in the rich countries have become richer, and the poor in the poor countries have, for the most part, become poorer.

Forty percent of the 6.5 billion inhabitants of this planet live in poverty, some of them in extreme poverty: they survive on an income of one dollar per day. Africa has gone from a 41% poverty rate in 1981 to 47% in 2001. Nigeria, a country that in the last thirty years has earned a quarter of a trillion dollars in oil revenues, has seen its per capita income declined by 15% from 1975 to 2000. The number of Nigerians who live in extreme poverty has increased from 19 million to 84 million. Globalizations has missed Nigeria.

What is the part of America in this human tragedy? American financial aid to underdeveloped countries has consisted mostly in loans and grants, unfortunately more of the former than of the later. The recent American mortgage credit crisis is only a local reenactment of the international crisis of poor nations burdened by debts they cannot afford to pay.back. Even Russia and Argentina have defaulted in their debts to historically high levels. Poor nations, that borrow too much anyhow, have to bear the risk of subsequent increases in interest rates, unexpected or cleverly manipulated fluctuations in exchange rates, national decreases in income due to natural disasters, such as the tsunami, or the collapse of exports. The United States, as the leading lender in the world, is sometimes blamed for all the burdens of the indebted borrowers. Accepting assistance from the IMF often brings with it a loss of economic sovereignty. Grants bypass some of the problems of loans, but the greed and bribery of unscrupulous rulers who specialize in money laundering, makes them often even more risky. Financial aid to poor countries is often translated in high levels of pollution and low levels of research and innovation.

The financial institutions that work as investment banks for the Third World are seen by others as American institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank. and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Only the USA has an effective veto power on the IMF; the president of the World Bank is appointed by the US President without any consultation with the American Congress and much less with the approval of borrowing nations.

The power to decide conflicts is invested in international tribunals that are often held in contempt by the US as threats to its unilateral hegemony and sovereignty. Bush’s cavalier attitude toward the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, or international treatises such as the Kyoto Protocol, have spoiled the image of our country as that of a fair, honest, and impartial arbitrator.

Poor countries have specific grudges against the United States. American agricultural subsidies, the source of one third of farm income in the USA, are rightly blamed for the global depression of farm goods prices. American agricultural subsidies translate into lower incomes for millions of poor farmers in underdeveloped countries unable to compete with he lower price of American imports. The resulting poverty of farmers spreads to those who sell goods to the farmers: tailors, butchers, storekeepers, and barbers. It does not take much for misery to spread.

To add insult to injury American agricultural subsidies are seldom given to poor, small, family farmers. In fact, 87% of the money goes to the top managers of large agricultural conglomerates in the USA. American corporate welfare exacerbates the problems of poor farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. American taxpayers provide American cotton explorers – the largest group in the world – with almost 4 billion dollars in annual subsidies, subsidies that bring havoc to cotton farmers and producers of textiles all over the world.

The provisions of the Uruguay Round (1994) regarding the marketing of generic drugs –drugs that cut into the profits of drug companies– has in fact reduced the access of under developing countries to the production of those drugs, a tragic consequence to those affected with AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example.

Bilateral trade agreements, favored by the USA, tend to favor trade with some nations at the expense of other countries: as a result of NAFTA the trading of textiles with Mexico has increased at the expense of American trade with Guatemala or Bolivia.

American monopolies, such as Microsoft’s dominance in PC’s (87% of the market), spreadsheets, and the Internet amount to an unlawful monopoly of knowledge, price increases, and insufficient innovation, as the European Union has frequently (and with some success) argued in international litigations.

Rigged international auctions; unfair trade sanctions; trade barriers disguised as tariffs; unleveled fields created by asymmetric trade agreements; the undemocratic balance of power between rich and poor countries in legislating trade, all this and much more, has given the United States a bad name before the tribunal of international public opinion. No wonder Senator Obama has insisted in his campaign in the urgent need of radical change, all the way from the bloody streets of Baghdad to the offices of the United Nations in New York.

The numbers provided here have been almost exclusively taken from two magnificent books on globalization by he Nobel Prize winner economist Joseph E. Stiglitz: Globalization and its Discontents, 2001, and Making Globalization Work, 2006.

Extremism: Causes and Effects

The rhetorical excesses of Reverend Wright in Chicago’s Trinity Church and the criminal excesses of “Islamic extremism” in Iraq are the painful effects of causes that need to be properly dealt with. Senator Obama understands that, but Senator McCain does not seem to. Here we deal with both kinds of extremism.

Obama understands very well that the obnoxious rhetoric of his pastor is only the Sunday morning expression of the anger of his black community, an anger accumulated through centuries of poverty, ignorance, domestic violence, unemployment, gang warfare, insulting discrimination by the police and by the courts. Black pastors’ of “America the beautiful” have a unique angle on this country of ours, an angle that no white person can fully share. When Reverend Wright says that one should say “damn America” rather than “God bless America” he was only repeating what the founder of the Moral Majority, Reverend Falwell, meant when he said that the disaster of 9/11 was a divine punishment not for American gays and lesbians, but a damnation of America for tolerating them in our midst. Many of American homophobics and Christian neo-cons who cringe in horror to Obama’s pastor sermon, accepted Falwell’s unchristian judgment without a word of reproach. Senator McCain, a presidential candidate at that time honored Falwell with a visit to Liberty University just to reinforce his highly questionable conservative credentials.

Reverend Wright’s anger is not the problem: the problem is what causes him and most black ministers in America very angry  Those who get angry at their words are most likely causes of that very  anger. Reverend Wright’s sermons are the painful effect of hundred of years of humiliating racial discrimination . Obama’s reaction to it – a reaction that “white America” finds difficult to condone and is utterly incapable of  understanding– was a masterpiece of political prudence, personal courage, and Christian humility. The relations between races in America will never be the same. Lincoln emancipated the slaves; Obama has begun to cleanse American society from racial tensions between whites and blacks. It is the poverty of our ghettoes rather than the enraged words of a pastor that truly stain the beauty of America.

McCain’s speech on foreign policy was a masterpiece of shallow thinking. To McCain, as to his mentor Bush, American national security is totally dependent on our victory in Iraq. A “reckless” withdrawal from Iraq would make America vulnerable to the “extremist“ suicide bombers of al-Qaeda.   This is a strange manner of thinking for the former prisoner of the Vietcong. American defeat in Vietnam (and it was a defeat!) has not confirmed the dire predictions of the domino theory then in vogue: “if we fail in Vietnam, communist China will be in southern California in a couple of weeks.” The opposite is now the case; China is now financing our typically Republican (?) national debt.

McCain has been saying that he is ready to maintain the presence of American troops in Iraq for hundred years more. He then adds that American garrisons in Germany and Japan are on their way to be kept that long there without any big problem. To compare Iraq to Japan and Germany is, to say the least, an evident proof of the Senator’s massive historical ignorance,

Contemporary “Islamic extremism”(the favorite expression of President Bush nowadays) has long roots in the centuries-long antagonism between Christian Europe and “pagan Asia.” The Huns, the Ostrogoths, the Avars, the Vandals, the Slavs erupted from the central steppes of Asia to bring devastation upon the Roman Empire. Attila, the Scourge of God, conquered Hungary and the Balkans and threatened Rome. Alaric, the Visigoth king,  stormed and sacked Rome.
With Islam, history took a new turn. Just hundred years after the Prophet’s death, Muslim minarets and mosques blossomed on the landscape of the Abbasid caliphate that stretched all the way from Cordoba to the Indus River, from Byzantine Constantinople to Vandal Carthage. Senator McCain has not given any evidence at all that he is familiar  with the invasion of Spain by Arab troops, with the “Christian counterattack” of the Crusades, with the conquest of Constantinople by the Saracens, with the earliest  warmongering of the American Navy in Tripoli under Jeffferson as Commander in Chief; with the bloody history of the Ottoman Empire on the European Balkans; with the birth of modern Turkey under Ataturk; with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I; with the ravages of European colonialism in Africa during the 19th century; with the replacement of European colonies by European “protectorates” in the Middle East; with the humiliating beginning of what today we call the “ nations” of Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman,  and  Saudi Arabia; with the close links of modern Iran,  Afghanistan,and Pakistan with British colonialism.

The American illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the occupation of Palestine by Israel remain right now two daggers of hated occupiers in the heart of Moslem lands, occupiers that keep suicide bombers proliferating in the world of Islam. The greatest threat to American national security is the lingering presence of Petreaus and his troops in the lands of Iraq. To kill, bomb, and  devastate are nowhere the ideal means to promote democracy, much less in the Middle East.  Democracies do not blossom among ruins and graves, they grow slowly from the bottom up, far from automatic weapons, tanks, and checkpoints.

The centuries-long conflict between the more or less Christian West and  the Islamic nations of the Middle east, Asia, and Africa has to come  to a final and decisive end. I hope that when Obama talks about change in foreign policy he  means that kind of historical change. Of all the politicians on the stage today he is the only one who is young enough and  educated enough to envision an America who abdicates for ever her arrogant claim to build nations, to solve international disputes in unilateral ways, to abuse American firepower as a   means of promoting democracies. I hope Obama has the vision of a new America eager to help solving global poverty, bent on seeking the global abolition of nuclear weapons  while helping other nations to build their peaceful nuclear plants to  solve part of the huge challenges the world is going to face in the next decades of climate change, the rise of the sea levels, the droughts and the floods.  Hillary seems proud of her “experience,” but many Americans think that she is too miredin it, an experience of a political style which deserves to be dead. McCain would only prolong forever the miscalculations, the deceptions, the Guantanamos, and the surges of American troops in Iraq to witness from the sides the sectarian and fratricide battles going on today around Basra and Baghdad.

Florida/Michigan: The Irreparable Mess

The disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan was a terrible mistake that might be very difficult to repair. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) established a rule for the duration of the game, not a rule to be changed toward the end of the game, much less at the insistent request of the team that is, according to many experts, clearly behind on the score board. The very phrase re-doing the Florida and Michigan primaries is not fair to Obama, simply because no primary ever took place in either state since there was no campaign and therefore no contest. It would mean that the same DNC that established the rules is now ready to change them. To say, as some networks say, that Hillary WON Florida and Michigan is a typical Clintonian deception that smells not much better than Bush’s spinning games.

Why is it that no participant in the game objected to the rules before the game started? The Clintons did not object just because they were convinced that Hillary was the inevitable nominee. After Hillary began to lose eleven primaries in a row, even Bill Clinton began to have nightmares. The result of those nightmares were the gutter politics of the last ten days and, again, the attempt to bring back the voters of Florida and Michigan.

I am in principle opposed to the disenfranchisement of any voter for any reason whatsoever. But I am also opposed to re-enfranchising the disenfranchised toward the end of the game. The reason is very simple. Primary campaigns have a dynamic of their own: a vote in Michigan or Florida in May or June is not the same as a vote toward the end of the primary season. Each primary now has a history that was not there in January. Each primary in January was a preamble to the primaries in February. According to political observers, the Hillary campaign has been a monument to internal strife, unexpected resignations, lack of organization, and poor financial management (the truth is that she has no experience whatsoever in managing anything). To ‘re-do’ (?) the democratic primaries in Florida and Michigan (where they were never done) represents a desperate gesture to make us forget the partial setbacks of South Carolina, Wyoming, Missouri, Illinois, etc. The Clintons are telling the voters: ”Vote now as if we never had any bad experience in our campaign, as if Obama did not have the momentum he has achieved.” I just hope that Obama does not fall for it. Let us go straight back to Pennsylvania, Oregon, North Carolina, and let the voters decide.

Although neither team will have the clinching number of delegates by the time of the convention, it is only fair to give the nomination to the candidate who is closer to that number, whether the delegates are from Rhode Island or from New York. They all were created equal with exactly the same inalienable rights. Hillary’s insistence on the importance of large states ignores the irrefutable fact that some large states (like California, Massachusetts, and New York) would vote democratic in the general election regardless of who the state nominee is. She also underestimates Obama’s capacity to attract independents, unhappy republicans, young idealists (both men and young women), and, why not, African-Americans. As a new group of voters they represent not the old established apparatus of the Democratic party, but the future of America politics. If Obama’s traction among black voters in Mississippi would also take place in Pennsylvania or Indiana. the Clintons’s dreams would probably be shattered in those and other states, like North Carolina or Kentucky, opening the gates for the final victory of Obama both at the Democratic Convention and in the general elections on in November.

If you agree with me, and specially if you disagree with the views expressed here, please leave you comments right here.

Racism and the 2008 Election

The closer we get to the moment of truth in the primary season of the presidential election, the more somber and threatening the political landscape appears to the observer. Everybody knew from the beginning that the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the Democratic party could easily degenerate into a confrontation between women and blacks. Unfortunately, in the last two weeks of February, the “bad angels” of our society have proliferated in increasingly nefarious and ominous ways.

The very possibility that, for the first time in history, a black man could become the president of the United States, has brought to the surface all the traces of a latent but still harmful racism poorly hidden and disguised in the deep recesses of our national soul. One of the most alarming indications of such poison was the intensity and pervasiveness of negative campaigning against Senator Obama in the week preceding the pivotal primaries in Ohio and Texas.

By comparing such merciless scrutiny with Bill Clinton’s brazen injection of race politics into the South Carolina primary, one feels compelled to blame the Clintons for the tone of the unwarranted attack on the character of the black candidate to the presidency, Barack Obama. I say ‘unwarranted’ because this time for sure Obama was above reproach. Unlike Hillary – who has repeatedly played the feminist card and gloated of possibly being the first woman in the Oval Office etc, etc.– Obama has had the wisdom and the self-control of totally ignoring color identity politics, even when addressing predominantly black audiences. By doing that, Obama has already given the nation a historically powerful therapy in the way we think of ourselves as individuals and as members of the community we call the United States of America. At the risk of sounding exaggerated, I would dare to say that Obama has significantly advanced the process painfully started by Lincoln when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Lincoln put an end to the ‘pecu;iar’ institution of slavery; Obama has taken a further historical step by making all of us transcend any thought of ourselves as either white or black. Unfortunately, not every American is like Barack Obama.

Bill Clinton has been whining for weeks about the unfair treatment of his wife by the American media. To prove the former president wrong, American television and newspapers (not to speak about ultraconservative radio) have gone to the opposite extreme. Suddenly, Hillary’s foreign policy experience –whatever that means — has made her the only person capable of answering emergency calls of the red phone in the Oval Office at 3 am,, an almost Sesame Street way of saying that Obama is just not prepared to be “the Commander in Chief.” His only foreign policy experience, Hillary inacurately claimed, was just “one speech in 2002” denouncing and rejecyng the invasion of Iraq, an invasion that. she fatally supported. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, kept saying that the talk of Obama’s opposition to the war (which he never denounced nor rejected in his filial conversations with Bush senior!) was simply a “fairy tale.”

To prove Obama’s sloppy handling of problems with foreign powers, Hillary criticized the answer of one of Obama’s staff members to the Canadian inquiry about the planned rejection of the Nafta treaty. Speeches in an election political campaign are not precisely the footprint of future policy decisions, he said. That answer — which was not spoken by Obama and was correct and harmless — could be misunderstood. It was totally misunderstood: an elderly black lady on television said almost in tears: ”I knew I could not trust that man (Obama).” Hillary commented: “This is a typical example of Obama’s cynicism and duplicity. What he conveys to the Canadian government is radically different from his message to the crowd of the unemployed in Ohio.” Thirty-five years of “experience” have obviously made her a perfect match for her husband.

To make clear how these black gentlemen from Chicago can be, Hillary mentioned in most of her speeches the case of Mr. Rezko, an old acquaintance of Obama who was on trial for alleged corruption charges. She forgot to mention, however. that Obama had not been in any way connected with any of the alleged wrong doing. But the Clintons were able to find a picture of Obama as a teenager dressed with Somali native garb in Kenya; to remind her audiences that Obama’s middle name was Hussein; that he had attended a madrasa (in Indonesian: a school) as a child; and so on and so on.

This mean, insistent and malicious talk proved, unfortunately, to be highly effective. Almost 70% of the undecided voters in Texas changed their mind in the last three days of the campaign, and voted for Hillary Clinton. Only Senator McCain was smiling. Obama’s aides have urged him to respond to the Clintons in the same tone, but he firmly responded “I will not go there.” To go negative for political advantage is the typical brand of establishment politics. Obama’s mission is to change that.

I hope the leaders of the Democratic party understand that unless the Clintons begin to behave rationally and in a civilized manner, the American Democratic party will not only loose the election in November but will loose the enthusiasm and idealism of millions
of young Obama supporters for the foreseeable future. Not to say anything about the attempt to count the non-voters in the non-campaigns of Michigan and Florida…

Super-delegates are Hurting the Democratic Party

People keep saying that the super-delegates to the convention could hurt the Democratic Party. They are wrong; they have already hurt the party, simply because they are dividing the party into two different parties, the party of Hillary Clinton and the party of Barack Obama.

Some pure souls have managed so far to remain unsullied by the emotions of the moment, but most democrats are truly afraid of the possibility that some super-delegates they never voted for, whom they do not even know, some professional party bureaucrats, would vote for Hillary simply because they got a very persuasive phone call from either Bill Clinton or from some nationally well-known feminist. Obama’s supporters are really upset by that possible travesty. Hillary’s supporters are kept in a constant frenzy by the words of Bill, her Machiavellian hubby. Some of them swear that they would leave the democratic party for a few years, would refuse to vote in 2008, and would indeed abstain from further financial assistance to any democratic candidate in the foreseeable future.

Whether these anxieties are reasonably based upon reality or not, the media (newspapers, magazines, radio and television combined) are indeed very eager to promote them to keep their clients nailed to the “latest developments.” News in America are indeed as marketed as prescription drugs or toilet paper. Each primary or caucus, from Iowa until Wisconsin two day ago, are presented as the decisive ones, until they happen. Then, it is the next caucus or the next primary, whether it is in Delaware or in Hawaii, that will shape our future and the future of the civilized world for the next hundred years, to use McCain’ s favorite time frame.

The institutional device of “super-delegates” is simply a bad idea, whatever the original intent was. Even the name is offensive: delegates who are superior to those simple-minded voters who had to walk a few miles in the snow of Wisconsin to cast their vote; delegates who can vote any way they choose without accountability of any kind, without ever reading the papers about the results of the primary in their own district; delegates who knew whom to vote for even before people deliberated for a long time how to vote. It is not the people who decide, but only those of superior intelligence and political expertise. Where are you, Tocqueville?

I do not mean to say that abuses of this kind are normal in our system. We firmly believe that most super-delegates will honor the will of the voters (either nationally or the voters in their own district), seek the good of the party, and behave as the honest men and women they are supposed to be. It is not that the system is abusive; the problem is that the system is readilyto abusable.

One ardently hopes that voters will take matters in their own hands; that by the end of the primary season either Hillary or (most likely) Obama will have such clear advantage in votes, delegates, and primaries won that no super-delegate at the convention would ever think of changing the democratic verdict. Unfortunately, the House of Clinton has publicly announced that Hillary is ready to claim both Michigan and Florida, a flagrant change of the game rules after the game is over. Her ambition and his art in cheating are no doubt capable of anything. That would be a tragedy for the country, and would not open the doors of the White House for wife or husband. Black people, white democrats (like myself), women who voted for Obama, young and old voters, Obama Latinos and Obama independents, will in large numbers refuse to vote. McCain will reign undisturbed for a third Bush-term until the end of the Iraq war, a hundred years from now.

Open letter to David Brooks:

In your article “When Reality Bites: Imagining a Democratic presidency,” (New York Times, 2.12.08, A 23) you predict that, if the democrats win the November election, the apparent unity of their “unconstrained unreality” will be tragically torn asunder by the brutal but unavoidable decisions regarding the withdrawal from Iraq and the painful choices of future domestic spending.

Your prophetic statements (your record as a prophet is a mediocre C-) prove beyond any doubt that you have not escaped the morbid poison of the Bush elite to which you have always belonged in spite of your baroque flourishes on paper and your nervous tics on television. The decision to withdraw the troops from Iraq –a decision supported by many generals and veterans of the war—is going to meet, you say, with the opposition of powerful Arab leaders (can you name a few?), with outraged and “highly photogenic” colonels screaming “betrayal!” (this is getting sick); with independents (except those, I suppose, who have joined Obama) who would “furiously” oppose the insanity of ending local efforts in reconstruction projects and the training of Iraqi troops “just when they are producing results.” (a Bush mantra we have heard many times before). Do you ever read the newspaper where you write, Mr. Brooks?

To cap all these dire predictions you announce that a quick withdrawal from Iraq would be followed by “a bloodshed” to go “on the new presidents’ head.” This is plain nonsense: the bloodshed, Mr. Brooks, has being going on for five years now. The Bush administration has been very careful to censor the news about Iraqi civilian casualties, but according to Johns Hopkins University estimates there were about half a million civilian casualties one year ago! So there is plenty of blood to cover the head of Mr. Bush, your head, Mr. Brooks, and the heads of all those photogenic colonels you seem to like. People who object to the withdrawal of our troops keep repeating that Iraq would become “chaotic.” What has it been if not chaotic since 2001?

Finally, I find almost incredible that a Bush admirer — as you indeed are — will have the insolence of rubbing on the face of the 2009 new president his or her pain in bravely attempting to bring back to life a nation left in historically high financial distress by all the lies, all the deceptions, all the criminal mistakes of the Bush cabal. Candidates to the presidency know well that reality in 2009 will be, as you put it, “unkind.” The democratic center and the democratic left, which are not as divided as your wishful thinking pretends them to be, sooner or later will come to, if not to solve all the problems left behind by a disastrous administration, at least to heal part of the wounds and to live in peace with the rest of humankind. The days of unilateral hegemony are over, hopefully never to return again. It’s too bad, Mr. Brooks, that this time you have missed the train that takes history to destinations for which apparently you are getting too
old.

Super Tuesday 2.5.08: the Aftermath

Democrats and Republicans decided that on February the 5th twenty-two state primaries (or caucuses) should bring the presidential election process to some firm conclusions. The polls closed last night, tornadoes ripped five southern states, and we still have no idea who will be the nominees of the Democratic or the Republican parties for the national election in November.

Republicans made some progress, albeit a very controversial progress. McCain, who has won some primaries, thinks and says that he is now the fron-runner to be the nominee of his party. But the party has several wings and the wings seem rather disconnected from each other.

The conservative wing of the Republican Party includes the neo-cons of the Christian Right, a bunch of people concerned about “values” who so far have been rather reticent and apparently detached from the whole earthly thing of trying to get people to vote. One thing is certain: they do not like McCain and McCain in no way echoes their opinions. McCain, the American hero in a Hanoi prison, is not particularly known for his Christian fervor. He is rather known for his delusional Bush-like fervor to end (some ten years from now!) the Iraq war with on old-fashioned American victory. He still can sponsor moderately liberal bills with friendly democratic senators and has the reputation of being a man of integrity (no small praise these days!).

There are two other candidates who might seek the vote of conservative Christians: one is the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, and the other, Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas. These two totally different personalities have something in common: they are both former Christian ministers: Romney was a Mormon missionary and Huckabee, a Baptist pastor in the South. But, while Huckabee plays the guitar and has a harmless sense of humor, Romney is seen as an ambitious millionaire more than willing to morph his political positions to suit his political opportunities. Almost everybody speaks well of Huckabee; Romney is just plainly not liked by many voters. Today he finally decided to “suspend” his campaign, a campaigns that was rapidly turning into a senseless waste of his millions. It was not a promising business.

Who, at the end, could be the Republican nominee? Super Tuesday did not help at all to sketch his profile (no women in the contest). If the Christian Right gets into an attacking mode. McCain is out. Will the Republicans try to cash in on Huckabee’s guitar and common sense or still try exploit Romney’s inexhaustible checking accounts, good looks, and business experience? It depends to great extent on the name of the Democratic nominee, to whom now we turn our attention.

The problem with the Democrats is that they have two front-runners, both of them with very justifiably spacious egos. One is, for the first time in history, a woman with a long ‘experience”; the other, a powerful speaker who is, also for the first time in history, a black young man from Illinois, Kenya, Chicago, and Harvard. Both of them have now a similar number of delegates. Neither one seems ready to yield to the other, a possibly disastrous situation for the party and the nation. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could divide the party and surrender the election to the Republicans. There is a faint hope that one of them will in the next few primaries — some in the South (Mississippi) and some in powerful states (Texas,Pennsylvania, Ohio) – and earn a significant advantage in the number of delegates and quality of the voters (= diversity in age, gender, race, professional standing, etc). In that case, an unlikely one, whoever decides the issue at the convention (super delegates) would have less of a problem in persuading people like you and me that the choice was fair and in the public interest. But this is a rosy scenario compared to the other scenarios that are not impossible at all: division of the party, defections in large number, absenteeism from the polls on election day, and even Taiwan-style brawls.

One last hope is that some thing will happen in the last days before the convention capable of persuading everybody that it is in their own self-interest to chill out and maybe even to sacrifice the applause of the moment to the magnificent promises of a not very distant future. What that event before the convention might be is anybody’s guess: maybe Obama sweeps all the primaries still to be decided (particularly Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas); maybe Obama and Hillary will decide to be part of the same ticket (in which order?); maybe respectable super-delegates succeed in convincing them to accept a deal. In that case, McCain might have to wait for another sixteen years, at least. Enough time, one hopes, to rebuild the Supreme Court with men and women who do not look at all like Roberts or Scalia. The alternatives to these possibilities are too ugly to be mentioned in this family blog.

In spite of all my fears, deep in my heart I still have faith in my adoptive country. ¡ Si, se puede!