Barack H. Obama: The “Non Partisan” Report Card

“Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”

Peter Drucker

When Obama became President in January, 2009 he and his party had a mandate from the country to lead them to greater unity, fewer unnecessary wars of choice and greater economic prosperity for all, not just a few. That meant lowering the debt, less wasted expenditure and most of all, a more efficient Federal government that once again was working for the people. His was a mandate to mend a dysfunctional political process and a broken country. What a grand mandate for any man wanting to become a great leader. Obama’s message of HOPE had not only resonated with a hungry electorate, but also energised and rallied a new generation that had never come out to vote before. Amazingly, Obama had managed to appeal to a broad swath of Americans in the middle, and reached across the political divide at a time when the country was more divided than ever before in its history. Even perhaps daring a few sworn enemies to believe that maybe this was the change the country had been thirsting for after sixteen years of unzipped pants and unwarranted swagger.

When Obama won the election in 2008, I wrote off his first few years in office based on his lack of experience, naivety and because he was not a career politician (albeit this was also, in large part the reason I liked the man - and felt he had a chance to succeed and help America – the fact that he was not a jaded career politician). However, he has failed to turn his charisma and words into real leadership and there has also been an odd dichotomy in his approach to the foreign and domestic fronts. In foreign affairs, his judgement, decisiveness and handling have paid great dividends for America, and will reap even greater one's in the long run based on his policy choices. He stood his ground on Egypt, under tremendous pressure from Israel, Republicans and members of his own party, and came out on the right side for both America and democracy. No doubt it will be a long, blood-filled and arduous road for Egypt but that is the only way democracy can be forged. Most importantly it is the path chosen by the people of Egypt and not one dictated by America or Israel’s interests in the region. On Libya he forced Europe to take the lead in military intervention, and again it proved to be the smarter and better move for America. But it is with his handling of US-Pakistan relations that I have been most impressed. He is the first American President to take off the kid gloves and give them less room to continue their double game, while receiving US aid. The man also ordered a US military raid on their soil without so much as asking permission - that took courage to do against a “key ally”. The result of Obama refusing to cower, mollycoddle and constantly apologise, like all his predecessors, has led to a more obedient and co-operative ally that now thinks twice before calling America’s bluff because there are real consequences each time they do.

However, at home he has been an often absent and detached leader, on all major domestic issues he has shown little desire to take charge or lead the way. It almost feels like he is perfectly content letting “his people” run the show and lead him. People like Larry Summers on economic policy, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid on his signature legislation's. This at a time when the country needed a real leader, who would step up to the plate, outline a vision and then roll up his sleeves and work to bridge the divide on the Hill, reduce the vitriol and enact real solutions to grave issues facing this country. Nobody was expecting Obama to solve ALL the problems, or perform miracles and have Republicans and Democrats hugging and singing Kumbaya, but I was expecting him to at least take one or two big issues and make meaningful progress. One of Obama’s signature pieces of legislation, the healthcare bill, is 1,990 pages long (not unusual for spending bills which routinely run into 1,000’s of pages). It should be a major embarrassment for a President who swore to introduce transparency, clarity and simplicity into the process of legislation. While there is no doubt that there are some wonderful and much needed things in this bill, many parts of it are equally opaque, poorly conceived, written by lobbyists and filled with needless pork. And not one Republican voted for it. What’s more I cannot find anywhere who actually authored this bill. Then you have his other major legislation; the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform and Regulatory bill where Obama promised when signing "The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes. There will be no more tax-funded bailouts — period." (Source: NPR News). However, the landscape of the financial sector has changed dramatically since this law was passed, not to mention the fact that the law itself was obviously hastily written and poorly conceived. They took scant time to write and pass it even though they were dealing with matters that were arguably larger than America itself. Besides, would it not have been prudent to first fully understand the causes and consequences of this complex, multi-layered and global crisis before penning a law to fix it? Here is one example of this haste: “SECTIONS 404 and 406 of the Dodd-Frank law of July 2010 add up to just a couple of pages. On October 31st last year two of the agencies overseeing America's financial system turned those few pages into a form to be filled out by hedge funds and some other firms; that form ran to 192 pages. The cost of filling it out, according to an informal survey of hedge-fund managers, will be $100,000-150,000 for each firm the first time it does it.”  (The Economist, February 2012). Also absent from the proceedings was any leadership from Obama; I expected him to lead from the front on both these colossal issues, bring the various stakeholders, across the political divide, to the table and forge solid, sensible, hard-fought solutions that put the country’s future ahead of any party or political brownie points.

The first red flag, for me, came right after the inauguration when Obama announced his core leadership team. The people he chose were mostly washed out Clinton-era advisers and Bush one and two era bureaucrats and policy wags, who brought with them the baggage of the past and more worryingly the same partisan ways of thinking and functioning that had become so cemented in the later Bush years. The next thing that shook my confidence in Obama was his acceptance of The Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". Obama had given a few glorious speeches at this stage and perhaps even been a great community organizer. Sure he had become President of the United States of America (only the 44^th man in history), but that alone does not qualify one for the Nobel Prize. Call me old fashioned but I believe that one has to actually achieve something before accepting an honour for the achievement. An honourable man would have declined it based on the simple fact that they had not yet earned it. I suspect this was in large part of the beginning of the unraveling of Obama; the point at which he began to drink his own Kool-Aid and start to believe the hype and hysteria about him. Obama put himself on the same pedestal (that much of the world had) based on his words. He had not yet proven that he belonged on it, through his actions. Sadly, no matter how you cut it, the bottom line is that he has failed to become a leader or demonstrate the type of leadership the country needed after eight years of disastrous shoot-from-the-hip politics and cowboy-style management. People can make all the excuses they want about the mess Obama inherited (and there is no question that he did inherit one), but leadership is about taking on great adversity. About locking horns with it and staring it down until you have found a path to overcome it. Great leaders relish taking on the greatest challenges. They lay out a vision, then work to forge alliances, even bringing east and west together on issues, and they find real solutions to problems; lesser men and politicians make excuses and speeches.

Israel & Palestine: After Mavi Marmara

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

Mahatma Gandhi

Indians and Israelis have long felt a strong kinship with each other. 

 

Perhaps it has partly to do with both nations celebrating their birth and freedom from British rule barely 6 months apart. Or that both peoples have been invaded, persecuted and ruled by foreigners, and both share a rich history of culture and civilization dating back many centuries. 

 

In fact, a 2009 extensive International Study called "Branding Israel" done by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, looked at 13 countries (considered to be important in the world, including US, India, Canada, Great Britain, France, China and Russia), the greatest level of sympathy towards Israel was found in India.

People always talk about the United States’ unconditional support and pro Israeli bias, but amazingly 58% of Indians showed sympathy to the Jewish State, with the United States coming in second.

This kinship is also evident in our countries military and trade relations, with India being Israel’s second largest military and economic partner, after the US and Russia respectively.

Even more fascinating is that the Bnei Menashe (“Children of Manasseh”) is a group of more than 9,000 people from the North East of India who claim descendant from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Their oral history, passed down 2,700 years, charts their escape from slavery in Assyria and journey to Persia. They travelled through Afghanistan toward the Hindu-Kush and proceeded to Tibet, then to Kaifeng, reaching the Chinese city around 240 B.C.E.

During their years there, large numbers of the Israelites were killed and once again enslaved and persecuted. From here they pressed on to India where they were welcomed and stayed for the next few centuries (Source: Wikipedia).

Today many are starting to learn and practice Judaism again and a few hundred have also relocated to Israel. I am told that Hindi movies are hugely popular in Israel, even played on prime time television. So India too, much like the US, has historically had a pro-Israel default position in every situation regarding Palestine.

However, when Israeli Commandos recently raided a Turkish flotilla killing 9 people, India for the first time was openly critical of Israel’s actions. India’s stance made me wonder how things have gone so horribly wrong, for in the last decade things seems to have gotten much worse between Israelis and Palestinians, and now it feels like there is not even an inkling of light at the end of this tunnel.

To my mind this is directly a result of a severe dearth of leadership on both sides.

What Mahatma Gandhi realised was that Indians could not defeat the might of the British Empire on the battlefield or through freedom fighter’s tactics, as we called them, used to disrupt the Empire in small ways through bombs blasts and using small arms. He knew that the only way to defeat the British was to take the higher ground, to boycott their products, their rule and their way of life - much like Mandella who followed Gandhian principles decades later to unshackle South Africa from the chains of Apartheid and even Martin Luther King Jr. who followed Gandhi’s principles to fight for civil rights in America.

All these men understood that freedom can only be won by stirring the masses and waking within them a sense of patriotism, pride and conviction that is not hindered by the thought of losing one’s life – it has to be more precious and worth more than the fear we feel in the absence of it.

This is something no leader has stirred within the Palestinian people until now. There is a small and growing movement stirring within the West Bank, where men who once wore masks and carried guns are joining unarmed protest marches, goods produced in Israeli settlements are being burned in defiance and the Palestinian Prime Minister is visiting areas officially off limits to him and his people to plant trees to declare the land a part of a future state.

It is an extremely powerful way to empower the ordinary citizen, the majority of whom do not agree with the violent path their leaders have lead them on, a path that has seen no results after decades. In the last few months Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, visited and joined a protest march and Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak at a conference on nonviolence. It is still far from what can be called a mass movement, but it feels like Palestinians are realizing that violence and hard-nosed diplomacy have gotten them nowhere and that perhaps another approach is necessary to break this endless deadlock.

In recent times it feels like Israel in particular has lost its once strong leadership and the actions of the men and women who now govern her seem increasingly desperate, and more poorly thought out than ever before.

From the war with Lebanon, to the current blockade of Gaza and the most recent botched Commando raid, Israel has not only not managed to accomplish the goals she stated at the outset of these operations but also seems to be rapidly losing the much more costly moral high ground and public opinion.

In the most recent incident, where 9 civilians carrying humanitarian aid were killed, it is hard not to see Israel as the bad guy. To make a case for self-defense for highly trained Commandos (arguably among the best in the world) facing a group of men armed with chairs, clubs and sticks – hardly the makings of an armed and trained terrorist unit – is a tough one. At least in the court of global public opinion.

Granted the Palestinians have not stopped their attacks on Israelis as the peace roadmap states, but Israel too has not held its end of the agreement, to dismantle illegal outposts and not build any new ones. By building a fence and walling in the Palestinians, Israel is only succeeding in cutting them off from their land, means of economic survival and livelihood which will in all probability have the opposite effect it intended.

By creating more hunger, poverty, unemployment, and lack of education and opportunity, it will serve to make the next generation of Palestinians even more desperate. If you cage people like animals long enough, one day they will behave like animals.

Ultimately, somebody will need to take the higher ground for there to be any resolution and lasting peace for both peoples. It feels to me like the Turkish flotilla incident is a real chance for Israel’s leadership to reset course. To change their tactics, their policies and take the higher ground to forge a new peace agreement with the Fatah backed Palestinian government.

If they can do this to create a two-state solution which brings peace and economic prosperity to the West Bank, its economy and people, then Hamas will be totally isolated and the people of Gaza less likely to support them and their failed policies – forcing Hamas to come to the negotiating table on Israel’s terms.

But if Israel continues to flounder and the peaceful moment within the Palestinians begins to take real and meaningful root and, much like Gandhi’s famous salt march to Dandi, we see start to see widespread civil disobedience with unarmed Palestinian women creating roadside blockades, protests and showing peaceful defiance against armed Israeli soldiers and there is even one drop of bloodshed in this situation – then it will be hard for India and America to continue defending Israel, and for the world not to see Israel as the bad guy.

To Close or Not to Close…

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.”

Benjamin Franklin

The word Guantanamo has become synonymous not with America’s War on Terror or her defense of the ideals of freedom but with un-democratic prison camps. A place where enemy combatants are held indefinitely, without charge and even denied Geneva Convention rights as well as access to and representation from council. They are in a state of limbo. In fact, Guantanamo Bay is not even located on American soil, so it is fair to say that they are also in a place of limbo, where the long arm of US Federal law and the greatness of her democratic principles do not apply. There is little argument today that while Guantanamo served to hold men with no status and no criminal charges, it has served greater purpose in damaging America’s moral standing in the world and sullied her reputation as a great democracy. It’s difficult for the US government to tell other nations to free prisoners who are being held for “treason” against their government when the US herself holds men with no status, even if they are not American citizens or political prisoners. I am sure there are those among you who feel it is a small price to pay, to keep America safe from men who seek to harm her and inflict untold damage to her property and people. But to my mind the argument for closing Guantanamo needs to go far beyond a debate simply between liberal or conservative ideologies and their corresponding positions on national security. To my mind the discussion around closing Guantanamo should focus on one thing – and that is whether its continued existence will erode the very heart of the democratic ideals on which this country has been built, and the reason why it remains the most democratic superpower even today.

At first blush my statement might seem ridiculous, to suggest that the fundamentals of American democracy might one day suffer based on the existence of a prison camp on some forty-five square miles of land and water. But a look back at recent history will tell us that these types of actions in a democracy, which may seem small or inconsequential at the time, have a tendency to grow and expand over time and power always gets abused by people. So even the most well-intentioned laws created to protect national security or citizens from evils the world faces cannot be allowed to exist outside the existing framework of the laws of the land. They should be contained and able to operate within the confines of existing laws, even if there is a need for enhancements or amendments based on the realities of the dangers we face today. The moment a nation feels compelled to go beyond the existing legal framework and begin to create a separate one, and most often one that is also shrouded in secrecy, we begin the slippery slide into a murky world where the blindness and impartiality of justice can never prevail. Simply because there is no transparency and because government lawmakers become the sole indictors, enforcers, judge and jury. A true democracy holds itself to higher ideals. A great democracy does not need to operate in the shadows.

One argument that was been forwarded by the US government, for opening Guantanamo Bay, was that these modern day terrorists are more evil than the evilest of men. Suggesting that these men are somehow more evil and more bent on destruction than evil men in generations’ prior, so the need arises for another system of incarceration. Well, I for one have still not witnessed greater evil than Adolf Hitler. The fact that he managed to seduce an entire nation into his sickness and delusion, got them to look the other way and many to actively participate in his cold blooded murder is more than Osama Bin Laden has come close to doing in attracting a handful of illiterate, misguided and poverty-stricken youth. The terrorists of today don’t even come close to the sheer lunacy, audacity and barbaric nature of Hitler’s Germany and their plans to systematically and methodically wipe out an entire race of people. The point is that given the heinous nature of Germany’s crimes, as atrocious and inhuman as they were, it elicited a response from the world where those individuals held responsible were tracked down, arrested, charged and then punished in a court of law. A court that operated within the confines of a democratic process, before the public eye where justice meted out and served in broad daylight. The other important point about the Nuremberg trials is that the legal framework for prosecution of the War Crimes came about after discussion, debate and finally agreement between all the Allies. It was not a unilateral decision or one led and defined by a single country or government. Sure WW II was global and involved most every large nation but is this not even truer of the war against terrorism? These terrorists recognise no geographical boundaries; they represent no state or flag and care not what colour, race or religion they kill. Surely, America does not believe that she alone faces this nameless, faceless and stateless enemy?

In fact, America, unlike a host of other nations has not faced terror on her soil for very long. Mainly, because of her geographical location, which makes it hard for would-be terrorists to penetrate her borders with weapons and because of her population, which makes it harder for these men to blend in and disappear. Consider for a moment the list of countries that have had to deal with and even today live with terrorism on a daily basis, largely because of the geography that surrounds them and the history that transpired before them. This list includes India, Israel, Russia and China, and what I find interesting is the way each country has chosen to deal with the problem. Both India and Israel have dealt with homegrown and external terrorism since their independence, some 60+ years ago. Both have borders that are easy to penetrate and hard to police. Both have complex multi-denominational populations and thousands of years of history behind them. Both are democracies and proudly uphold and cherish their democratic freedoms and ideals. And both have lost untold life to terrorism over dozens of years. Yet both these countries continue to use the existing legal system to try, prosecute and convict terrorists, successfully. Sure, there are often issues of national security involved in these proceedings and they are dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Exceptions are made as needed but they never deviate or feel compelled to set up a parallel system of justice purely to try or incarcerate these terrorists. They convict them in a court of law based on the evidence against them, give them due process and a chance to defend themselves, just like the Nazis had and for the same reason – because this is what fundamentally differentiates us from them. Now, consider on the other hand the China’s and Russia’s of the world, both countries that consider themselves democratic, in some form or another, albeit the term is considered used loosely in the eyes of the rest of the world. Both face similar problems with internal and external terrorism, yet the manner in which they deal with them is completely different from India and Israel. It involves subterfuge, secret courts and trial proceedings, media blackouts, no access to council and mostly all of it conducted deep in the shadows of their so-called democratic processes and far away from public eyes. There is a reason people do not cite Russia or China as examples when they talk about democracy and democratic principles, but instead talk of their shady human rights record. A state that has a transparent legal system for one type of criminal offences and a second, hidden and shadowy system for other types of offences can never be considered democratic because there can only be one set of rules and interpretation of them for everyone, the law of the land. Justice must always be blind. The moment one feels the need to take off or slightly open the blindfold, even just a little bit, one begins to compromise this basic principle. And it is this principle that separates true democracy from the pretenders of Russia, Iran, China, Egypt and so on. So the US decision to leave open or close Guantanamo Bay’s prison camps will determine which type of democracy she chooses to be associated with in the future.