From my Archives: My assessment of the Obama’s presidency
From my Archives
My assessment of the Obama’s presidency. Excerpts:
Few men in history enjoyed the same overwhelming adulation that welcomed Barack Hussein Obama into the White House. All over the Globe, people danced for joy when the Man who campaigned to effect a “Change we can believe in,” swept into office on January 20, 2009. TV screens showed grown-up men and women openly shedding tears, as they witness what they thought was a Miracle – A Black Man in the White House! Even veteran stalwarts like Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey wept like babies.
So much was the global expectation for peace in our time under President Obama that the Nobel Prize Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 2009.
As Mr. Obama entered the twilight of his political career, it is only fair to assess his performance and try to answer the central question of why he chose to squander all the global goodwill he had and ended up leaving the world in much worse shape than he met it.
Obama’s compatriots in his country are the best judge of his domestic policies, so we shall confine our analysis to his foreign policy.
Although we in Africa claimed and welcomed him as our brother, even the most rabid Obama-admirer among us will be hard-pressed to name a single thing our half-brother in the White House did for our continent in his eight years in office.
Although we do not ask or beg for handouts, it nevertheless hurt to remember that our brother failed to render a helping hand when he was the most powerful human being on earth.
Although he delivered highfalutin rhetoric in his travels across the continent, Obama leaves no enduring legacy for which we shall fondly remember him by. We can contrast his lamentable legacy with those of his immediate two predecessors.
Thousands of Africans still reap benefits from The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) signed into law on May 18, 2000, by President Bill Clinton. AGOA was an initiative to help African businesses gain entrance into the US market. And, as they travel on the Georg Bush Highway, Ghanaians will give praises to the much-maligned President George Bush jr. who donated it to them.
It does not make us cheerful to note that while the Chinese are all over our continent building railroads, highways, air and seaports, and other economic infrastructure to lift our people out of poverty, our brother in Washington, along with his Western allies, continue to invest in the militarization of our continents – see New African excellent coverage of the militarization of the Sahel region in the magazine’s January 2017 edition.
It is also instructive that the single largest US infrastructure built in Africa under Obama was the US$100million Drone facility in resource-rich, but impoverished Niger – source: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/29/u-s-military-is-building-a-100-million-drone-base-in-africa/
It is also perhaps not a coincidence that it was under our brother’s rule that the US Military made its most significant inroad into Africa. From a few bases a few years ago, AFRICOM today ringed our continent with more than 60 outposts – source: https://www.blackagendareport.com/node/4844
It is probably in the case of Libya that history will be most harsh on Barack Obama. We will never be told what led Obama to join France, Britain, and the Netherlands to abuse a UNSC resolution to invade and destroy the most prosperous of African nations – Libya.
Obama’s Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton was shown on TV gloating like a demented hyena over the killing of a de jure and de facto leader of an African nation: “We came, we saw, he died.”
That is an image that will forever blemish Mr. Obama, even though he called his misadventure in Libya the greatest folly of his administration.
Ok, granted that we are all capable of making mistakes, but what condemn Obama in perpetuity is his not making amends for his grievous error in killing Muammar Ghaddafi, and rendering Libya a Failed State.
Ordinary people across the world, who were totally fed-up with the social, economic, ecological, and environmental devastations neocons and neo-liberalisms engendered, believed and trusted the man with a beatific smile, who promised us a change we can believe in.
Sadly, the expectations for a better world under President Obama were misplaced. For reasons best known to him, he chose not to do anything different from his warmongering and murderous predecessors. Obama actually upped the ante in the amount of sheer ruthlessness he brought into killing the perceived enemies of his country. The New York Times informed us that Obama maintains a secret kill list: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html
And the man to whom the Nobel Prize was awarded, with the hope of bringing peace to a war-ravaged world, approved more drone attacks than all his predecessors combined. “As a result, the number of estimated deaths from the Obama administration’s drone strikes is more than four times what it was during the Bush administration — somewhere between 1,494 and 2,618.” – https://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/05/opinion/bergen-obama-drone/index.html
According to investigative journalist, John Pilger in his documentary, “The coming War On China”, Obama spent more money on modernizing American nuclear weapons than any president in history. Obama’s geopolitical thinking is clearly spelt out by his Secretary of Defense Ashley Carter who bluntly stated that the: “US policy is to confront those “who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us” – https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/02/the-coming-war-on-china/
Although the United States is technically not at war with any country, Obama continue to keep the Military-Industrial Complex on a nice roll: “In President Obama’s last year in office, the United States dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries. This estimate is undoubtedly low, considering reliable data is only available for airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and a single “strike,” according to the Pentagon’s definition, can involve multiple bombs or munitions. In 2016, the United States dropped 3,027 more bombs—and in one more country, Libya—than in 2015.” – https://theantimedia.org/nobel-peace-26000-bombs-2016/
That was the from a man who told the world in his speech at the University of Cairo on the 4th June 2009: “The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God’s peace be upon you. Thank you very much.”
Sadly for those that believed in him, Barack Obama betrayed their trust. To the eternal regret of his well-wishers, Obama reacted to foreign policy challenges exactly the same way his predecessors did – by continuing with deploying American military power to solve problems.
Those who touted Obama as a brilliant scholar will have to answer the question of how the Russian leader, Vladmir Putin, managed to make him look like a clumsy, clueless, unimaginative amateur in all their encounters in the international arena.
Take the case of Syria. Obama drew a line in the Syrian desert over the use of chemical weapons. When it came to actuating his threat, he managed to peeve even his Western allies. Putin came to his rescue with an imaginative masterstroke – agreeing to ship the chemicals out of Syria.
That was the beginning of the end of US relevance in Syria. Today, Mr. Putin is emphatically calling the shots in Syria, so much so that a critical meeting to settle the Syrian crisis is going ahead without US participation.
Obama might not be the architect of the US debacle in the Middle East, but it was under him that Russia, and to a lesser extent China, become major players once again in the region once considered the exclusive preserve of the US.
Observers also cannot but note that under Obama, the US lost the respect of many once considered solid allies. The Philippines shifted its gaze to China with his president using very foul languages in describing Obama. Turkey and Egypt have pivoted towards Russia. Even the leader of a client-state like Israel treats Obama with utter condescension.
Outwitted, outclassed and outplayed by the Russian leader, Obama was reduced to sulking and acting like a petulant schoolyard bully...”
Read the full article here: https://alaye.biz/obamas-legacy/