President Lyndon Johnson once said: “Being President is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There is nothing to do but just stand there and take it”. Perhaps the forty-forth president today is feeling what the thirty-sixth president once felt, as Barack Obama, a year after entering the White House, finds himself in the middle of a shooting gallery, where both the American right and the left are firing at him, more than they are firing at each other. If arrogance was one of the qualities of a politician, as he promises and breaks his promise, and as he even denies his promise even when it is recorded in both sound and image; if it so, then the American right is arrogant to the extent of being obscene. This is because President Obama committed himself to George W. Bush's Iraq withdrawal plan, increased the number of troops in Afghanistan in order to pursue Al-Qaeda's leadership, and did not close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp because as it turned out, many of those who were released rejoined the ranks of Al-Qaeda in Yemen and other countries. In fact, Obama even kept George W. Bush's Secretary of Defence in his job, and it seems that Robert Gates will remain in office this year as well. The Bush administration thus bequeathed the Obama administration its failed wars and a crippled U.S economy. Nevertheless, Obama continued this legacy and did undo it, as I have shown above. Yet, what was the right's stance towards him? The top war criminal Dick Cheney said that Obama is not taking terrorism seriously, and what seems to be the goal of his presidency is social transformation with the aim of restructuring American society Cheney ordered the release of 530 detainees from Guantanamo, of which 14 percent reengaged in terrorist activities, or 74 men, according to a review by the Defence Intelligence Agency; yet, he has the audacity to attack Obama. Meanwhile, Senator John McCain, who lost the presidential elections against Obama, claimed that the president is “leading an extreme, left-wing crusade to bankrupt America.” Thus, Cheney is accusing Obama of being a socialis, while McCain is accusing him of being a communist. But both men are nevertheless overlooking the fact that the Bush administration has left Obama with a bankrupt country and losing wars. On the other hand, the liberal wing in the Democratic Party now believes that Obama has let them down, and has abandoned his principles after entering the White House. There are many individuals on the left of the party who thus view Obama as a “war president” like George W. Bush. Perhaps a good example of this would be Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who ran against John Kerry in the Democratic primaries in 2004. He expressly said that Obama has abandoned his principles. Dean is now spearheading a party, or a wing, within the Democratic Party itself, in opposition of the president. This wing now enjoys the support of over one million people. His reservations are not exclusive to the administration's foreign policy; rather, they started when the healthcare plan was relegated to the extent that it ended up being very dissimilar to the original draft that was proposed. However, the liberal democrats are forgetting that the healthcare bill was passed in the end, and that 30 million Americans who hitherto had no healthcare coverage will now benefit from this plan. They seem to have thus forgotten that Barack Obama has succeeded where Bill and Hillary Clinton failed, when they attempted to pass a similar bill between 1993 and 1994. Hence, the American right is accusing Barack Obama night and day, through television, of what it itself did to America and the world, especially its Arabs and Muslims. This is while the American left is responding to this by accusing Obama of moving to the ranks of the right and selling his principles. If I were a U.S citizen like my two brothers and my son, I would have probably criticized Obama, if for one thing then for not turning his words in his historic speech in Cairo six months ago into deeds. Specifically, he did not achieve any progress in improving America's relations with Muslims, nor in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, despite the fact that the latter is the basis of all subsequent conflicts, and that solving it means defeating Al-Qaeda's terrorists and other organizations that use this cause as their bloodied shirt. If we consider the word blowback, it was coined by the CIA to mean the unforeseen consequences of a certain policy. I believe that the word was invented a year after Mohammed Mossadegh was ousted in 1953, when the Shah returned, and ruled [Iran] as a dictator for a quarter century, before being succeeded by the Ayatollahs' anti-American regime, and the hostages who remained captive for 444 days in the U.S embassy. Today, Obama is facing the blowbacks of an American policy the least that can be said about is that it is colonial, as the U.S sought to build a new empire, but ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Iraq, to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In fact, these killings are still ongoing, and no solution seems to be in sight. However, Obama did not carve out this policy, but rather inherited it. It remains for us to see whether he will be able to carry out his promises to the Americans and the world, and whether he deserves the confidence of the people who voted for him and made him president. Going back to Lyndon Johnson, he once said: “Any jackass can kick down a barn. But it takes a good carpenter to build one”. Is Obama that carpenter? Only time will tell. [email protected]
