Obama, the Failed Hope

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency of the United States, I thought the worst, and the worst occurred. When George W. Bush won, I thought the worst, and the worst happened. When Barack Obama assumed the presidential office on Jan. 20, 2009, I thought the best, but the worst has followed. Skin color is clearly not what determines the sensitivity, humanity or conscience of the individual that occupies the White House. I naively came to believe that Obama — as a descendant of a part of North American society that had been enslaved, oppressed and subjected to apartheid — would offer the world the values of multilateral dialogue, peace, mutual understanding between civilizations, racial equality and defense of national sovereignty. But Obama has been doing exactly the opposite. It’s enough to turn our gaze to his complicity in Israel’s crimes in Gaza to erase all the hope he awoke when he was elected president of the world’s leading power.

Obama is driving wars that he is not winning, and he is leaving entire countries bleeding and fractured, without an end to the carnage in sight. His destructive legacy is encapsulated in Libya; with NATO as his instrument, he overthrew the dictator Muammar Gaddafi and gave his support to a coalition of distinct factions with very diverse ideologies and objectives. Today, Libya lies in chaos, the factions wage war on each other and the entire country is a cemetery. What is the advantage of having overthrown the dictator? Without a doubt, democracy cannot be imposed on people by bombing their presidential palace. The people themselves must make the step towards democracy, hopefully without an intermediary stage of war. Every nation must tackle its own dictator.

The image of North American soldiers tearing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad is absurd. The United States saving the world? That was the message they wanted to send? Today, Iraq is a river of blood. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. Today, tyranny has many heads in Iraq and no one to control them. Obama supported the Syrian rebels in their fight against Bashar Assad’s regime, while the Islamic State jihadists strengthened their supranational project, conquering territories in Iraq, Syria and Libya through the massacres of Christians, Yazidis and Turks. It appears the president of the United States doesn’t care that he has substituted tyrants for cruel, fratricidal, interethnic, religious wars that have produced millions of refugees, tens of thousands of deaths and many completely shattered societies. And even still, he has the audacity to declare that “we can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide.” Could he be referring to the killings in Gaza? No, it doesn’t seem likely.

Obama is no better for the world than Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. He hasn’t even followed through with his promise to close Guantanamo.

In these days of brutal attacks in Gaza — horrible, cruel, sadistic, murderous days that have claimed 2,000 deaths, 456 children among them — Obama has presented the following: a rhetorical declaration calling for an end to the violence; unconditional support to Israel in the United Nations Security Council; shipments of weapons to Israel’s army; a defense of Israel’s right to defend itself — an indefensible defense, completely unreasonable and unacceptable to the civilized world, given the slaughter of Gaza’s civilian population. The most tragic of all is that Obama knows that he is dealing with crimes against humanity; he knows that once Israeli settlers and soldiers abandoned Gaza in 2005, the territory was immediately subjected to a blockade by land, sea and air, exposing the population to a slow death of overcrowding and misery. Obama knows that every so often, when Israel suggests a little “clean up” in the 140 square mile strip, it escalates into campaigns of massive destruction.

Obama also knows the origin of the current events. The Zionist government burst into fury in April of this year, when Hamas and Fatah decided to form a nationally unified government. Israel immediately demanded that the Palestinian National Authority break off its agreement, solely because Israeli politics is that of dividing the Palestinian people. This is how, time and again, Israel can say, “We can’t negotiate with the Palestinians because they are divided.” The Zionist government manufactures unreasonable politics in order to avoid negotiating. And President Obama — like many North American presidents before him, trapped by the North American Jewish lobby — sits and obeys. And there’s more: the existence of the Palestinian National Authority would have meant placing the union between the West Bank and Gaza in the foreground — something that Zionism detests; it prefers the two regions separate. Gaza, which has access to the sea, is the point of departure for the Palestinian nation. The Zionists prefer to have it enclosed in a genuine, open-air prison, with Gaza besieged and blockaded, and the West Bank surrounded by a wall of human shame.

Obama knows that Israel is wrong ethnically, politically and religiously. But he supports them unconditionally even though that involves infanticide. The blood of innocent boys and girls cry out against the all-powerful Obama, from the bottom of the ruins, from the bottom of the tragedy.

Israel will not have peace until there is justice; that is only fair. And for that, Israel must fulfill the United Nations resolutions, beginning with [Security Council] Resolution 242. Peace will be feasible provided that Barack Obama says to his criminal ally: “Game over.” I don’t think he’ll do it. He represents a failed hope, a fraud to the civilized world.