Obama - What Next?

Congratulations to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party for their victories last Tuesday.  Obama retained the Presidency by a substantial margin in the electoral college, while the Democrats increased their lead in the Senate.  The Republicans retained control of the House, but two wins against one is a very good result.  But what might it mean for the next four years?  

As a non American, I have not followed the internal political battles in the USA.  My interest in American politics is primarily in its foreign and economic policies.  While the USA is no longer the greatest economy in the world, it is still by far the most important and as the dollar remains the world's reserve currency, changes in US economic and financial policy have enormous repercussions for the rest of us.  However my main concern here is with US foreign policy, as this is the area where the USA remains supreme in the world, in large part because it is the sole remaining military superpower.  So can we expect any changes in US foreign policy now that Obama has been re-elected and no longer has to worry about a third term?  Foreign policy is one area where there has been little change since Obama first won the Presidency.  Particularly in the Middle East US policy under Obama has remained much as it was under Bush.  In that part of the world the US seems to be stuck in a sinking mire.  The first rule of politics when in a hole is to stop digging.  Alas, under Obama the US seems intent on sinking even further into the mire.  The three most important hot spots in the region are Afghanistan, Iran and Israel/Palestine.

While the US has begun to get out of Iraq, in Afghanistan, Obama has increased the American military presence.  To what end?  Little of positive benefit seems to have come from this continuing military presence.  Hundreds of US and allied troops have been killed or maimed, while thousands of innocent Pakistanis and Afghanis have been killed or maimed.  Afghanistan is no more secure than under Bush, while Pakistan has become even more unstable, with a noticeable rise in extremism.  Just what is the end game for the USA in Afghanistan?  There seems to be no clear strategy beyond the current situation, which effectively amounts to Afghanistan remaining a bloody semi protectorate of the USA.

Iran is another country where Obama has simply pursued the existing policy and indeed with the imposition of punitive sanctions has been even more hardline than Bush.  The US has never really accepted the existence of the Islamic Republic of Iran and has opposed it since its inceptions in 1979.  The current punitive sanctions are supposedly in response to the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons programme.  Now even if the Iranian regime was planning to develop nuclear weapons the simple response would be - so what!  After all our close ally in the region, Israel, does have nuclear weapons and moreover has still not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (which Iran has).  And of course Israel has never suffered any sanctions.  So why Iran?  The various international inspectors have never found any definitive evidence that Iran is planning to build nuclear weapons, never mind an actual programme to build weapons.  Every Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic has pronounced on several occasions that it is against the tenets of Islam to possess nuclear weapons.  Once again, what is the end game for the US in Iran.  It seems that the US is simply determined to bring down the Islamic Republic in its entirety.  Again to what purpose?  It cannot be democracy as the US supports non democratic regimes in the area such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan etc.  The imposition of these punitive sanctions does nothing to help the internal opposition to the current Iranian regime.  US policy here seems to serve no purpose other than simply to punish Iran.

Israel/Palestine is another area where Obama has made no difference to previous US policy.  The USA still offers unconditional financial, military and diplomatic support to Israel.  Again there seems to be no purpose to this policy.  The US is ostensibly and in public still in favour of the so-called two state solution for Israel and Palestine.  Yet almost every day Israel destroys the whole basis for this two state option.  If anything, the pace of illegal Israeli land grabs in the occupied West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem has increased while Obama has been in office.  And the USA has done absolutely nothing to hold Israel to account.  Once more we wonder just what the US envisages as the end game in Israel/Palestine?  The US does nothing to advance the two state option, quite the reverse.  So what is going on here?

These are for me three of the most crucial foreign policy areas where Obama could make a difference.  It is not clear that Obama really supports the current US policy in these three areas.  Now that he no longer has to worry about future re-election, will the real Obama stand up?  Or is he too just as mired in the failed policies of the Bush era?

Israel and Iran - A Tale of Two Countries

Once again the screws are being tightened against Iran.  The USA, as always supinely supported by the UK, wants to ratchet up the sanctions against Iran.  And of course Israel and its supporters in the USA would really like a war against Iran.  Something which the USA refuses to rule out.  The ostensible reason for this latest bout of sabre raising is the assertion that Iran is on the verge of building a nuclear weapon.  Western politicians, closely followed by their cheerleaders in the media, constantly bombard us with scare stories about an Iran with nuclear weapons.  All this scary stuff about nuclear weapons is of course just bullshit.  The Iranians have always denied any nuclear weapons pretensions and the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) has consistently found no evidence of a nuclear weapons programme.  This is also the conclusion, perhaps surprisingly of the Israelis.  A recent report in Haaretz, via Juan Cole, confirmed that the Israeli intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran has not yet decided whether to begin a military programme to construct a nuclear warhead.  US intelligence agencies have come to the same conclusion.


So why all the talk about harsher sanctions against Iran?Here it is important to remember that western hostility to Iran has nothing to de with nuclear weapons.  Iran's nuclear programme began while Iran was still ruled by the Shah, that great friend of the west.  At that time the west showered Iran with praise and economic deals, including nuclear deals.  It was only after the revolution which toppled the Shah and ushered in the Islamic Republic that the west turned against Iran.  What the west and the USA in particular dislikes about the current regime in Iran is that it offers a ongoing challenge to western hegemony in the middle east, source of most of our oil.


To bear this out, one only needs to compare the west's treatment of Israel with its treatment of Iran.  On the nuclear issue, while Iran clearly has no nuclear weapons and has always denied any nuclear weapons ambitions, Israel does have nuclear weapons.  It has had them since the late 1960s and continues to develop them.  Israel is the only nuclear power in the middle east, yet the west has conspicuously failed to impose any sanctions on Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.  Israel has also failed to sign the Non Proliferation Treaty, while Iran has.  This means there are no 
IAEC reports on Israel's nuclear weapons programmes.  And  still no sanctions from the west.  The photo at the top of this post shows the latest Jericho 3 missile which provides Israel with nuclear strike capabilities within the entire middle east and Europe. 


When it comes to living peacefully with your neighbours there is also a great difference between the two states.  Iran has not attacked or invaded any country for at least over a hundred years.  It has of course been attacked in that period - think Iraqi war, when the USA and the UK backed Saddam Hussein of all people, but it has not itself attacked anybody.  Contrast this with Israel, which has been in a constant state of war with most of its neighbours since its inception.  A birth that involved the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their historic villages and towns.  Since then Israel has invaded Lebanon twice or is it three times, Egypt and Jordan at least once and continues to illegally occupy the Golan area, part of Syria.  Not to mention the ongoing occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.  So one country, Israel, has a recent history of invading and occupying the territory of its neighbours, yet is immune from any sanctions or indeed of any kind of pressure whatsoever. While another country with no record of invasion or occupation is the subject of western imposed sanctions and threats of military attack by either Israel or the USA or both.


It would nice if just once in a while our mainstream media and especially our supposedly independent BBC was to properly investigate the double standards on display in out treatment of Israel and Iran.