This time ten years ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I was backpacking around another country with next to no public transport, boundless poverty and an unquenchable thirst for war. In case you hadn’t guessed I’m talking about the USA. That country must now make a historic decision and I’d like to throw my two pennies’ worth into the debate, if I may.
Hillary or Obama? The first female US presidential candidate or the first African American one? Well folks, I can reveal that I would plump for the latter and here’s why…
Let’s get one thing clear to start with. It’s not because he’s black. “He isn’t black”, a black guy from Harlem that I met one night pointed out to me. “His mom is a white woman from Kansas.” His dad incidentally was a foreign exchange student from Kenya who attended the University of Hawaii. He was raised in Indonesia. Without wanting to perpetuate stereotypes, I think it's safe to say that Obama's life thus far has borne little resemblance to that of the majority of African Americans. In any case, it’s beside the point. This choice should not be racialised or feminised. You should vote for someone based on what they stand for, not because they’re black, white, a woman or whatever.
If I could I would vote for Obama mainly for one reason. It may seem like a small thing but in my opinion it would help the world avoid a path to mutual destruction. He has said that he would be willing to talk to America’s ‘enemies’ (read: Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran and North Korea) without setting preconditions. What a genius! Why didn’t anyone else think of this before? I mean, what harm can possibly come from talking to your adversaries? Aren’t you less likely to bomb someone into oblivion if you’ve at least had coffee with them first and discussed what it is about each other that pisses you off so much?
Because of this Obama’s detractors label him as naive. Hillary may be more experienced and have a better grasp of some of the details than her Democratic rival but she has ruled out any such meetings with the aforementioned countries without first setting preconditions. It pays to stand firm and be principled sometimes but in many other instances it is far better to be pragmatic and judge a situation based on first-hand experiences. Meet someone, talk to them, weigh up what they are saying and then decide on a course of action. Perhaps that way we can avoid another six trillion dollar war like the one Hillary voted for.
Obama is currently leading in the delegate count that decides who will eventually become the Democratic Party’s nominee. Two big states, Ohio and Texas, are voting this Tuesday. They have been billed as make or break contests for Hillary, who has lost the last eleven on the trot. There’s no argument that she’s an extremely competent politician and would definitely be a vast improvement on the current president (not a huge achievement in itself). However, I can’t help but root for the other guy on this occasion. The world really needs him right now.
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Notes from an Englishman working for a development NGO in Monrovia, Liberia
3 comments:
Interesting to read this, especially now that we're more or less back to square one after Super Tuesday 2. I agree on Obama over Clinton, although it took me a while to get there.
I don't think anyone anticipated that the war would cost so much money though. I think had that had anyone in the US anticipated that it would cost them $3trillion dollars up to this point and a further $5billion every 10 days, the outcome would have been very different. As we know there was a lot of trickery involved to get people to believe it was a good idea, but there was also an overly confident assumption that it would be a walk in the park. It's easy to read backwards from this point and say it was ridiculous to vote in favour, but she wasn't the only one at the time who was convinced the war was the best thing to do.
I don't like the way that the Iraq issue polarises the electorate in this process - Obama shouldn't be so keen to pull out, Hillary needn't be pilloried so much for her yes vote, and we should not be focusing so much on an erroneous decision in the past but rather looking forward to see what's the best course of action from here.
My tuppence. Cheers again for a thought-provoking read.
Hmmm, I do agree that we must move forward and I also don't think that complete withdrawl is the best policy. I doubt whether Obama will be able to achieve this even if he really wants to.
It's more about consistency and attitudes. I think Hillary and everyone else who voted for it should be pilloried for the decision, at least until they admit it was wrong (which to my knowledge she hasn't). I think a lot of people, including myself, though the war was unjustified from the very start. The fact that it amounted to such an enormous death toll and financial cost just rubs salt into an already gaping wound.
I think that the enormous death toll and the financial cost of the war are integral to any assessment of how good or bad an idea it was. If the regime falling three weeks into the war had been the end of it then you may still have thought it all unjustified, but I don't think you would have the same huge groundswell of popular support in agreement with you. I think the fact that most people in favour at the time were operating in ignorance of what the true costs would be is absolutely relevant to assessing their decision. There are other considerations too - the ones that presumably made you against the war from the start - but I think that there's a tendency now to lump it all together, as though those who voted in favour were somehow asking for the great unholy mess we have now. My impression is that they thought - a lot of them - that they were voting for something else, and I think that's relevant even if it doesn't excuse them.
I think that Hillary should have to explain why she voted the way she did, and if she refuses to be clear on her position both now and at the time then she loses credit in my eyes. But the simple fact that she voted in favour needn't be as divisive as it is, in my opinion.
My beef with Obama on Iraq is that his current policy seems to be determined by a political need to play on his no vote, rather than on an unbiased appraisal of the current situation. It's regrettable because it's more or less the only area where he is playing politics in this way. I don't see that it's necessary.
Anyway, I'd vote for him, given the chance
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