BALANCED APPRAISAL OF OBAMA BEING PRESSURED BY THE EMPIRE

Idealism can wait, but only a year

The Independent
Rupert Cornwell
Sunday, 17 May 2009

Two of the US President's humanitarian plans were put on hold last week after pressure from the military. While voters will excuse a degree of compromise, they will not forgive many more concessions

You can't please everyone. If Barack Obama had any
lingering illusions on that score, the past few days have
banished them. The two announcements – that he will seek to
block publication of photos depicting US military personnel
abusing prisoners, and will go ahead with revamped military
tribunals to try Guantanamo detainees – may have reassured
the right that this president is not in fact a weak,
dewy-eyed crypto-socialist about to sell out the US to
foreigners.

But the liberals who helped propel him to the White House
are dismayed. Did we work so hard, they ask, merely to put
another George W Bush in the Oval Office? Their suspicions
will only have been increased by Obama's decision to send
more troops to Afghanistan. Even as America's commitment in
Iraq is about to wind down, its new leader seems to be
plunging deeper into another unwinnable war.

In the process, campaign promises are being torn up.
Candidate Obama got himself into Sarah Palin-related
trouble by declaring that the military tribunals were a
travesty of justice, and that to try and improve them was
like "putting lipstick on a pig". Far from being sent to
the slaughterhouse however, the beast is now being tarted
up with bucketfuls of rouge. Evidence obtained under duress
(aka torture) will be inadmissable, and the scope of
hearsay evidence will be limited. But the pig remains a pig
– military tribunals in which defendants have notably fewer
legal rights than in a regular court of law.

The same goes for the photos. The bold Obama that ordered
the release of Bush administration memos setting out those
"enhanced interrogation techniques" in chilling,
dispassionate detail, and who seemed to be happy to go
along with the release of the photos is now getting cold
feet, yielding to his generals' arguments that to do so
would hand a propaganda coup to America's enemies.

But the true lesson of these episodes is that governing is
tough. Smooth-tongued and unflappable, Obama has thus far
made governing look easy – remarkably so, given the mess he
inherited. "What is this, an episode of The West Wing?, a
top aide mused the other day when the President had to sign
off on the new Afghanistan strategy, and deal with a
threatened North Korean missile launch, a Chrysler
bankruptcy and the flooding of the largest city in North
Dakota, all in the space of a few hours.

Yet Obama has coped. He seems to positively relish the heat
of the kitchen. But how, indeed whether, he can cope with
the poisoned legacy from the "war on terror" is another
matter. The past isn't dead, it isn't even past, wrote
William Faulkner apropos of the American South. Never have
those words rung truer than in the controversies of these
last few days. The Bush/Cheney past hangs over everything.

It is easy to preach from the sidelines. Human rights
groups were appalled by the decision to maintain the
tribunals, just as the right was dismayed by the likelihood
that the prisoner mistreatment photos would be released.
But no one expects Amnesty International to worry about US
troop safety, any more than we look to conservative
think-tanks for ringing manifestos on prisoners' rights.

And it's equally easy for a politician to make
crowd-pleasing promises about tribunals and torture at an
election meeting in New Hampshire, or in a televised
candidates' debate. But the world is a vastly more
complicated place when seen from the Oval Office, amid a
barrage of security briefings prepared by experts whose job
is to think the unthinkable seven days a week.

Obama is proving himself a pragmatist, not an idealist. In
an ideal world, there is no doubt that Obama, a former
constitutional law professor, would have the photos
published and the tribunals scrapped. Deep down, he most
certainly believes that the dozen or so Guantanamo
detainees who will face trial (out of the 241 currently
held at the prison) should go before civilian courts on the
US mainland, operating by rules set down by the US
constitution.

But this is not an ideal world. At home, an American
president – even a president as popular as this one – is
less powerful than a British prime minister, a French
president or a German chancellor. He can propose, but
rarely can he dispose. The real world is full of highly
paid lobbyists, clever lawyers, and obstreperous
Congressmen who can thwart his every move.

Alas, pragmatism on its own is not enough. Obama still
enjoys vast goodwill, and a large majority of Americans
desperately want him to succeed, if only because the
consequences of another failed presidency are too awful to
contemplate. But he was also elected because of what he
promised. The public realises the conflicting pressures
upon him. Sooner or later though, it expects these promises
to be met.

The acid test will be the closure of Guantanamo Bay itself.
Obama has promised to do so by 20 January 2010, the end of
his first year in office. No reality on earth should
prevent him from meeting that deadline. Otherwise it truly
will seem as if one George W Bush has been replaced by
another.