<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> WorldTribune.com: Mobile — Attention foreign audiences: it ain’t what it seems!

Attention foreign audiences: it ain’t what it seems!

Monday, June 16, 2008 Free Headline Alerts

One of the great dangers implicit in the quadrennial folk festival now taking place in the United States to elect a new president is the misinterpretation of it by overseas viewers, not the least those in Asia. The special rites and protocols of the whole procedure are very indigenous. And, therefore, only the best of the foreign cultural anthropologists would have an inkling of what is really going on.

I have been reading through Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign book, “The Audacity of Hope” – a title by the way borrowed from his now rejected pastor and mentor, the leftwing black nationalist rabblerousing, social worker, wealthy Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Every candidate has to pretend to author one of these books, even if they are for the most part written by hired “ghosts”. I am amazed, however, with Obama’s effort. The resume, particularly, of foreign policy issues it contains has peculiar nuances that hark back to the 1960s.

Indonesia, for example, which Obama pretends to have a special knowledge of because as a child he lived there with his American mother [married briefly to an Indonesian student returned from the U.S.], has a history few would recognize who know the country. Obama appears completely oblivious – or is he in the clutches of the anti-anti-Communists radicals at Cornell University’s Southeast Asia studies? – to the attempt by Beijing to pull a coup with the Indonesian Communists in the mid-60s. The bloody reaction which followed – the slaughter of perhaps tens of thousands across the Islands, one of worst politically motivated mass killings since the Protestant Huguenots were eliminated in France in the mid-1500s – is where Obama’s history begins. And like the Cornell Communist fellow-travelers, he ascribes all this and the 30-year-long dictatorship that followed under General Soeharto solely to American machinations [CIA, of course, Oh! that it were that powerful and cunning!].

But any Indonesians reading this jeremiad should take heart. What Obama has written in this book is only part of a construct, as his would-be fellow academic intellectuals might say, which is erected to present his personality, more than his ideas, to the electorate. The meandering narrative “covers the waterfront”, touching virtually every issue, but always careful to pander to any and all constituencies it might encounter along the way.

As that old Roman proverb [Pliny] has it, take it all with a grain of salt.

It would be well for our foreign friends – and foes – and perhaps even those Americans a little intoxicated with all the hoopla that accompanies this circus, to remember that there are fundamentals which govern U.S. strategies and policies, some originating in the very concept of the nation, others dictated by more recent events.

Although Obama and his opponent, Sen. John McCain, do represent different approaches, some quite basic, to these strategies and policies, in the end either as president would find himself very quickly, as their predecessors have found, hemmed in by the facts on the ground as old solders say.

For example:

1] The U.S. was attacked in its homeland on 9/11, soon to be seven years ago, by an ideological enemy who tried then, has [apparently unsuccessfully] tried since, and will try again, to wound, damage, or more ambitiously, destroy America. Until those who propose this course of action are either eliminated or change their minds, U,.S. policy is locked into a pursuit of them wherever they are and whoever they may be with all the power of a huge, rich, and however bumbling at times, unique super power. The corollary, even though most recently Pres. George W. Bush has deflated his earlier brusque language, is that Washington will have no choice but to work with and against those who do not take part in the elimination of this threat – something “moderate” Muslims should recognize and think about long and hard.

2] There will always be dissenting voices in America, some so shrill that at times they seem to threaten what would seem to foreigners to be the most basic of U.S. foreign policies. That is in the nature of the American state and the democratic society which produced it, which honors and respects dissent even in the most bitter policy debates at the most dangerous of times in the nation’s relatively short 200-year history. It is all the more confusing for those who do not know and attempt to “work” the system when such disagreements are seemingly so close; the Supeme Court decision as this is written, a five to four decision of the nine judges, to return the Guantanomo battlefield prisoners’ process to American civil courts, at least in part, is a good example.

3] But there is a logic to most of these strategies and policies, even where there are horrendous mistakes and happenstance defying them as always occurs in human history. And any new president, once in office and faced with basic realities, would have to pursue them. A sudden and precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, for example, is not possible given the huge American commitment already made there and in the region – and if one has been following the rhetoric on this issue, he has seen Obama making steady retreats in the direction of McCain’s increasingly stronger emphasis on professions for longtime peaceful intent toward the same goals.

4] Whatever theories among the fashionable historians about the rise and fall of empires, there is no way – and most foreigner observers would probably admit this in the dead of night – to minimize the contemporary American impact on the world. It’s amusing to watch those who only a few months ago exaggerated the growing role of intra-Asian trade now suddenly trimming their sails because of the impact of the American economic downturn on the ultimate markets for much of the commercial laundry they take in from each other. Or those fat and thieving bureaucrats who continually turn up at the United Nations specialized agencies live off the American taxpayer in no small measure with Washington government-to-government and private contributions to their activities. So it is, too, with the Europeans who may have their students and “activists” in the streets from time to time to scream anti-American slogans but who know that so long as they are not prepared to bear a heavier burden for self-defense, they are dependent on the Americans to pick up the tab in treasure and lives. It seems incredible that the European media [with its echo chamber in the liberal American press] does not recognize that the successful installation of anti-missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, a hot button issue in Europe just now, is the defense in the near term against rogue threats and perhaps actions by a runaway Muslim theocracratic tyranny in Iran against Europe not the U.S. directly! And then there is the “intellectual: environment; there are more than a few parts of the world, in fact, where the nuttiest U.S. fadm whether intellectual, political or psychological, arrives a few years later to be thrown back into the Americans’ face.

So, with a more than usually extended season for this carnival, one must up to a point just sit back and enjoy it. Whether it is Obama’s often purple prose – one of these nights he might just wander off into the sunset – or McCain’s stumbling as he tries to read a teleprompter with sentences written for his next book rather than for a speech, the show will go on.

   WorldTribune Home