Patriot Games

I've been wondering why it is that I find Barack Obama so enthralling; I think it's because he inspires such hope. If you get a spare half hour, the following video is worth watching: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DMbBuEoEYnk

The past few years, indeed, all the years that matter as far as I am concerned (those seminal years of early adulthood when mature political beliefs are forged), have been marked by an Anti Americanism that has grown more malignant with time, for reasons which seem obvious. I've started to think that the manifestations of this predjudice are subtle and varied. Much that is bad or disturbingly strange about certain aspects of American Culture have been amplified and mockingly presented to the British Public; Richard Dawkins taking on an extremeist Evangelical Church, Louis Theroux trawling the southern states for suitable wierdness, a 'medical' program about some poor Texan who wallows in the title of The Worlds Fattest Man. With the backdrop of the War in Iraq, the apparent hyper consumption of the American Population that seems determined not to join the rest of the G8 to tackle climate change, and innumerable quiet journalistic stabs, I would say I have some issues with modern America.

The patriotic fervour of Middle America has been consequently disturbing to me. Flag waving, anthem singing morons, as are often seen in the media, have a blind patriotism that is frankly scary. That is why this speech is so good. Obama describes his patriotism as a belief in the founding proncipals of the Republic, with dissent at the violations of these principals portrayed as the supreme act of patritoism. Obama discusses Martin Luther King. As a Patriotic citizen, he knew that the oppression of the black population was a violation of the constitution, and fought against it on that basis. He was thus at the time described as Unpatriotic, but he was faithful to the constitution and History has redeemed him as such. To quote from To Sir With Love By E. R. Braithwaite:

"I reflected on my life in the U.S.A. There, when predjudice is felt, it is open, obvious, blatant; the white man makes his position very clear, and the black man fights those predjudices with equal openness and fervour, using every constitutional device available to him. The rest of the world in general and Britain in particular are prone to point an angrily critical finger at American intolerance, forgetting that in its short history as a nation it has granted to its Negro citizens more opportunities for advancement and betterment, per capita, than any other nation in the world with an indigent Negro population. Each violent episode, though greatly to be deplored, has invariably produced some change, some improvement in the American Negro's position".

He goes on to say: "In Britain I found things to be very different. I have yet to meet a single English person who has actually admitted to Anti-Negro predjudice; it is even generally believed that no such thing exists here...The betrayal I now felt was greater because it had been perpetrated with the greatest charm and courtesy".

It is worth remembering the words of the Declaration of Independance: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". The hackneyed British response to this is the Orwellian snipe: "All men are created equal, but some men are more equal than others", but this misses the point. The Constitution provides a mechanism by which this equality before the law can be fought for, even if it means fighting against vested interest in the name of Constituional freedom. I would be patriotic of a my nation if its founding principals were so defined.

Barack Obama makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. He has made me believe in America again. No doubt I am being utterly naiive; no doubt the daily grind of the great statesman will scour off the gloss. No doubt some foreign policy crisis, hyenically reported in the press, will expose Obama's flaws, and the new will become stale as the image fades. But, for the moment, I am giving in to this sense of hope I get from the man. I find him exhillerating, and I am enjoying feeling this way about politics. Come on Mr. Obama, don't let me down. Don't fuck up in here.

The 10 Lessons of Robert S. MacNamara

Robert S. Macnamara, on either side of a glittering career at the Ford Motor Company, was a man of the American wars. During the Second World War, he served with the Lieutenant Colonel for the Army Air Force based in the Pacific, under the formidable Major General Curtis LeMay, architect of the devastating, ultimately nuclear, aerial bombardment of the Japanese mainland. His statistical approach, based on simple numbers like targets destroyed vs. aircraft lost, underpinned his entire career, and he is recognised as the institutor at the highest levels of Statistical Analysis. It is feasible, if unproven, that his presentations based on statistics to General LeMay encouraged to implementation of low level fire bombing (utterly catastrophic for the largely wooden Japanese cities) and the use of atomic weaponry. Fast forward a couple of decades, and we find MacNamara installed as U.S. Secretary of Defence as the crisis in Vietnam escalated. His application of statistical methods expedited the enormous logistical challenge of conducting such a war. A genuine, honest appraisal of the situation was buried deep beneath a mountain of statistics, a famous example being the chilling ‘Body Count’. With the upcoming U.S. election, I though I would share MacNamara’s conclusions. This man of the American wars, this machine of logic with the might of Hades in his pen, condensed his experience into ten lessons:
Lesson 1
The Human Race will not eliminate war in this century, but we can reduce the brutality of war – the level of killing – by adhering to principals of a “Just War”, in particular to the principal of “Proportionality”.
Lesson 2
The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
Lesson 3
We are the most powerful nation in the world – economically, politically and militarily – and we are likely to remain so for decades ahead. But we are not omniscient.
If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of our proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.
Lesson 4
Moral principals are often ambiguous guides to foreign policy and defence policy, but surely we can agree that we should establish as a major goal of U.S. foreign policy and, indeed, of foreign policies across the globe: the avoidance in this century of the carnage – 160 million dead – caused by conflict in the 20th century.
Lesson 5
We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
Lesson 6
Corporate executives must recognise there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head. Of course, they have responsibilities to stockholders, but they also have responsibilities to their employees, their customers and to society as a whole.
Lesson 7
President Kennedy believed a primary responsibility of a president – indeed “the” primary responsibility of a president – is to keep the nation out of war, if at all possible.
Lesson 8
War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court – that the U.S. has refused to support – which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
Lesson 9
If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy – I don’t mean “sympathy”, but rather “understanding” – to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
Lesson 10
One of the greatest dangers we face today is the risk that terrorists will obtain access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime. We in the U.S. are contributing to that breakdown.