Russia has agreed to return to the war in Afghanistan at the request of the Western states which helped the mujahedin to drive its forces out of the country 21 years ago.That tongue twister that the Independent came up with will be a future aside for historians to put in books about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the 2001 plus war in Afghanistan. Alongside the statistics and contexts of the two conflicts, they will note how the opposing forces and allies all later swapped about, with opposing forces of the first conflict becoming allies and previous allies coming to oppose each other. The players have changed though, and even if we allow the USSR and contemporary Russia to stand as similar entities, and America’s involvement in the 1980s to compare with the US forces in Afghanistan now, there are a lot of problems with declaring these to be old enemies turned allies.
Since 2009 Russia has provided US forces with a route into Afghanistan (airspace wise), supplied aircraft to Poland and could well provide NATO with helicopters, training and a route for arms. If Russia is going to aid NATO then the Obama administration is not necessarily happy with all of this as an ally. America is said to be concerned that Europe is dealing with Russia on its own, discussing foreign policy and security matters away from America and NATO. The New York Times has a senior US official saying: “Since when, I wonder, is European security no longer an issue of American concern, but something for Europe and Russia to resolve? After being at the center of European security for 70 years, it’s strange to hear that it’s no longer a matter of U.S. concern.”
Since when? According to the New York Times it’s since President Obama has been perceived as being disinterested in Europe [1]. All of this, and the airspace dependency on Russia, adds to the narrative of failure Barack Obama is currently presented in. After he appeared on the Daily Show on Wednesday night to discuss things in a comedy news way, everybody jumped on the ‘yes we can…but’ laughter. Certainly the British media are touchingly concerned, or revelling, in the liberal disappointment of his presidency suddenly revealed by those four words.
There is some idea that the people who raved about Obama were duped. Unfortunately for Obama the media raved about him (eventually), and when the media feels duped they feel stupid, resent it, and then bury their embarrassing previous take on a story with aggressive coverage of another angle. So, folks, Barack Obama’s America is now a limp liberal disaster. The recession and downturn turned out to be impervious to his inspiring new politics, healthcare reform was timid and brought no public option, his dislike of the war on drugs has had a few inconsistencies, and while America might be able to elect a black president, it still opens its newspapers to see teenagers and an 11-year-old committing suicide in the face of bullying and homophobic abuse.
On top of this state of affairs, or perceived state of affairs, America has its mid term elections on Tuesday. President Obama’s approval rating is around 43%, about the same as Bill Clinton’s when the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate in the mid terms of 1994. While this can’t tell pundits much about Obama’s chances in 2012, it does mean that the Republicans are commonly expected to become the majority in the House and to equal the Democrats in the Senate [2]. Supposedly this is because voters are either responding to Obama’s failure to bring change, or because he has brought too much change - in economics ($750 billion in stimulating the economy) or healthcare for example. Obama has done, and failed to do, many worrying things, and Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson offers a good list of both (Though Dickson actually offsets this list with the more general, and positive, ‘sweep’ of the presidency). The supposed ‘liberal lion’:
has surged 50,000 troops into Afghanistan — not to take the battle to Al Qaeda, but to prop up the corrupt and incompetent regime of Hamid Karzai. The prison at Guantánamo? Still open for business nearly a year after it was to have been shuttered. Uglier still: Obama has asserted the authority to assassinate American terror suspects abroad and has tried to block court challenges of that authority by invoking "state secrets."These things are genuinely troubling of course, but then I seem to remember the guy before doing a few worrying things. We’ve yet to get the full spectrum of Barack Obama’s presidency (or George Bush Jr’s for that matter – give it a few more years, and books). While there are other things from the last two years to be considered when viewing President Obama’s record, people from both the right and left are focusing on the items from the FAIL list, ostensibly agreeing with each other. This is only a cosmetic agreement – more of that shortly – but one that is very damaging for Obama and the Democrats, and perhaps unfairly so. It’s led, in places, to a vocabulary of disenchantment, of repairs being needed, as well as a necessary return to sanity. CNN’s William Bennett points out, for example, that ‘hardened liberalism has been unleashed in power and in office from the White House to the U.S. Senate to the House of Representatives’ And now? ‘The common sense antibodies of the American people are kicking back in.’ Common sense, Republican sense - just to offer a healthy check to the liberals of course. The hippy’s popular, more reliable older brother comes to clean up the mess. Either that or the brothers will fight like siblings.
On the economic front, Obama has surrounded himself with the same free marketeers who led Bill Clinton's calamitous deregulation of big banks, restoring Wall Street to obscene profits even as one American in seven has been engulfed by a rising tide of poverty.
As for the critique offered from the political left, Dickinson’s article quotes Jane Hamsher, the film producer and writer who established the progressive blog Firedoglake. In September she tweeted: ‘Fortunately, liberals and conservatives hate the health care bill for the same reason […]: it sucks.’ What Twitter word counts don’t allow for is the important caveat that liberals and conservatives have polar opposite reasons for thinking the bill sucks. For liberals the bill sucks because it didn’t go far enough, and showed the Obama administration to be timid. For conservatives it went far too far – no suggestion of timidity there. If the two sides were to listen to each others’ criticisms of Obama they might start to appreciate the bravery (that’s for the liberals to see) and conciliatory skill (that’s for the conservatives to see) of the legislation his presidency has produced so far – not to drop to their knees in awe, but to see it in context.
Mind you, if the left and right (both supporters and parties) listened to each other more anyway then politics would be more interesting/inspiring. Viewing everything a party or government does through vague and exaggerated notions of socialist liberals or ‘fuck you, neighbour’ conservatives doesn’t offer us very much. It may be better to pay attention to either side, and then understand what a party is specifically trying to achieve in its individual policies and legislation. Then voters, citizens and politicians could criticise their opponent party (or indeed their ‘own’ party) by attacking the flaws in the party’s method, or its erroneous choice of political goals. The most resonant, lasting attacks are those that call a party or politicians up on such in context failings – failings by their own (or at least hitherto) standards.
Such criticisms would be better than attacking parties with those easy accusations - attacks that deny that parties and political figures often have to make difficult, pragmatic and - forgive me - ‘off message’ choices. Coming back to the UK for a final moment, Labour’s Harriet Harman calling Lib Dem Danny Alexander a ginger rodent certainly isn’t helping, for instance.
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[1] John Vinocur, ‘Will the U.S. Lose Europe to Russia?,’ New York Times, 25 October 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/world/europe/26iht-politicus.html?scp=1&sq=afghanistan%20russia&st=cse>
[2] Rupert Cornwell ‘Yes we can, Obama said. But can he?’ The Independent, 29 October 2010 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/yes-we-can-obama-said-but-can-he-2119585.html>
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