The Obama Doctrine

President Obama occupies a special place in American history.  He symbolizes the dawn of a new historical epoch in the relationship between the New World and Africa, which supplied the slave labor to build that world. The president obviously understands his place in history.  However, he has not done anything substantive to symbolize that understanding.  I think a single pronouncement will take care of that.

President Obama should invite members of the African Union to Washington D.C and declare an Obama doctrine, to define the American contribution to fostering democracy, good governance and peace in Africa, from this point.

The Obama Doctrine should say that the United States will refuse to grant official recognition to any junta or government in Africa that is not produced and based on an internationally recognized vote of the citizens.

Liberals and the Arab Spring--From African Internet Forums

• -"Obama had no good choices concerning the Arab spring. He hasn't? Then, why upset the apple cart? Why uncork the bottle? Liberal ideology has some anti-American tint to it. Do you understand that? For Liberals, it is always America's fault first. In Obama's mind, conservatives had imposed despots on the Arab people. He did not know that there was a reason for that. He uncorked the bottle. Gaddafi and Mubarak are gone..."---Zubbie Ekwueme
  
  "For the liberals, it is always America's fault first." What is the evidence for that? The foreign policies of President Truman, Kennedy, Carter and Clinton? Note that it was the Truman administration that committed the United States to its Cold War doctrine of doing everything possible, to defend democracy and self government in the world community. President Kennedy almost took the U.S. into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, over that country's placement of missiles in Cuba. The Carter doctrine committed the United States to resorting to force, to defend its interests in the Persian Gulf. Under President Clinton, the United States sent troops into Somalia.
  
  President Obama neither caused nor led the Arab Spring. It was fashioned by the Arab streets. There was also no liberal/conservative divide regarding U.S. foreign policy in relations with the Arab world. The Arab Spring was inevitable, because people will sooner or later realize that self-determination, with all of its difficulties, actualizes human dignity and progress in ways that despotic political arrangements cannot.
  
  The digital revolution and the opening up of the entire world to instantaneous communication has made it impossible, to keep populations locked away in tyrannical enclaves. That is the simple explanation of the Arab Spring. Gaddafi and Mubarak and similar regimes could not expect to rule in perpetuity, especially in the digitally connected world. How quickly will such regimes crumble? That is the question, not whether they will crumble.
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    Shawn Williams Spot on. One of the clearest distinctions between "conservative" and "liberal" approaches to American Foreign Policy is an estimation of American power. Conservatives overestimate our power, overestimate our ability to alter personal beliefs around the world. To Obama's credit, he appreciates that the events in the Arab world are an historical wave that America must ride, and which we can only influence at the margins.

    15 minutes ago · Like
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President Obama: Be Bold, Surprise the Nation

If all we have heard and read about President Obama's upcoming speech are correct, this might be another missed

opportunity in the boldness-for-real-change department. What we have read and heard so far seems to indicate that

the president and his team are opting for a stimulus package redux after the pattern of the first $800b package, which

Republicans and the Tea Party folks have successfully sold to the public as a total failure.

I hope that the president would surprise us by coming out with a program that directly and massively attacks the two critical problems at the roots of the recession: the mortgage crisis, which has evaporated billions of dollars of wealth

in the middle class, and the high unemployment numbers, which have not budged due to the fact that corporate

America is sitting on billions of dollars in cash instead of using it to hire people, who will become active consumers and producers once again, of new products and services.

There are two items that must be in the president's new initiatives:

(1) A program to mop up the mortgage mess, by putting aside several billion dollars for directly buying up mortgages at the value of homes in today's market and refinancing at current rates for 30 years. The program should be run through

Fannie Mae and the housing departments of the states and the cities. The homes should be sold back to the current home owners.

(2) A program to give businesses large and small an incentive to hire people. Reducing the payroll tax to close to zero for 10 years is the kind of a bold program that is needed.

The first program would breathe financial life into the middle class all over the country, which has been devastated with

lost property values. The second program would finally give private industry the kind of long-term certitude they have been calling for, as for as a condition to start putting their huge cash reserves to work in the marketplace. Both

programs, if implemented will increase the likelihood of a second term for President Obama. The question is whether the Republicans will be willing to stop such programs through the legislative process, even though they are essential for

a quick economic recovery, just to deny the president a second term.

Fubara David-West.

Libya: President Obama's Skillful Use of Force

President Obama's management of the political use of multilateral military force in Libya has been a masterful display of how these kinds of operations should be handled, with little opening to mission-creep. As Bleckman and Kaplan (1978, 12) define it, a political use of military force involves a change in the disposition of at least a unit of the regular armed forces "as a deliberate attempt by national authorities to influence, specific behavior of individuals in another nation without engaging in a continuing contest of violence."

By focusing on the specific behavior that the United States wanted from the Libyan regime: stop all attempts to massacre civilians, who are merely moving against your decades long rule, the president was able to lead the NATO alliance, UN and other forces on a well-calibrated mission. By handing over the mission to NATO once its parameters were established through the rules of engagement on the ground, the President ensured that there would be no engagement in "a continuing contest of violence:" a hallmark of a martial use of military force.

I thank you.

Fubara David-West.

Stopping the Libyan Slaughter of Libyans

The final outcome of this conflict should determine the kind of institutional and operational structures within the African Union, which will should be kept alive. The African Union and its member states, cannot stand by and do nothing to forcefully stop the slaughter of Africans by their supposed government.

President Jonathan in Nigeria should step out and lead the AU out of its inaction on this matter. If he has any vision for change, he should use it now to move African states to finally repudiate the idea that a government, in the name of state sovereignty, can commit crimes against its citizens and not be held accountable by the international community. This is a time for leadership.

As things stand, whether the Qaddafi regime succeeds in keeping its hold on power or not, after this crisis, its legitimacy will be in tatters, and it does not have the kind of power that a China has in international politics, to ward off such a devastating blow in the international community, as China was able to do after the Tienanmen Square massacre in 1989.

President Obama, whose performance on this matter has been outrageously weak, should immediately move towards leading NATO members, to recognizing the provisional authority that the Libyan opposition is putting together, and to start a massive effort to both arm the opposition and to ensure that the Qaddafi regime does not survive.

I thank you.

Fubara David-West.

Egypt and Obama's Riddle

Obama’s riddle: withdraw or keep military aid?

Until the United States discards the complexes it developed during the Cold War, which made it imperative for the country to search for and support individual rulers and political leaders as "allies", instead of the countries themselves, it will continue to stagger from one of these kinds of crises for its foreign policy, to another.

At the core of the notion of the individual ruler as an ally is a value system that is actually inimical to everything the United States should stand for: a value system that abjures popular sovereignty. Mubarak could not be an ally of the United States. Egypt has always been the real ally. American officials should always keep that in mind, if they are to effectively sell the message of popular sovereignty and American support for its underlining values to the world.

I thank you.

Fubara David-West.




Obama’s riddle: withdraw or keep military aid?By Bill Emmott

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1 minute ago
America must stay unequivocally on the side of freedom and reform. That means making a break with the past
It is a sobering thought, for any European or American prone to proselytising for democracy and human rights, that this month’s events in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab dictatorships have had so little apparent connection to anything the West does or says. It is even a tad embarrassing that it is al-Jazeera, a broadcaster backed by the dictators of Qatar, that has been closed down first in Egypt and not the BBC or CNN.
That embarrassment is, however, as nothing compared with the fact that the rulers being overthrown were previously known as our “strategic allies”. We did little to bring them down — at least Hosni Mubarak has so far paid no heed to the phone calls he has had from Barack Obama and David Cameron, urging him to democratise Egypt — and yet so far we seem to have escaped direct blame for the rulers’ past sins. However, if that immunity from blame lasts it will be, shall we say, quite surprising.
Perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps WikiLeaks’ revelations of America’s honest view of the Tunisian dictator’s venality and incompetence have played a part; perhaps, a loyal US spokesman might now say, the tough speech in Doha, the Qatari capital, on January 13 by Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, warning Arab governments that unless they reformed they would be in danger, might have caused a few ripples; perhaps the European Union’s “Barcelona Process” of talks with the other side of the Mediterranean over trade and aid amid muffled mumbles about political development made some minute difference. We don’t and can’t know. Like Mr Mubarak right now, we need to be humble about our own powerlessness.
We shouldn’t, admittedly, be too self-deprecatory about this. Revolutions have always happened in unpredictable ways at unpredictable times, making it impossible to say with any certainty why the crowds formed and the necessary sense of collective bravery emerged in one country at one time and not in another country at another time.
Contagion helps, and so does the dissemination of information about how an overthrow was organised, whether by internal groups, by outside lobbies such as the International Centre on Non-Violent Conflict in New York, or just through Western media coverage.
The main tool by which we can promote democracy and other freedoms is by our own conduct and example. The trouble is, that also includes our conduct towards the dictators. Everyone knows about realpolitik, and most accept the need to do deals even with people we view with distaste, for ever risking accusations of double standards. But realpolitik leaves a trail that is likely to be exposed eventually: in a revolution, the archives are thrown open, previously silent people talk, and in an atmosphere of recrimination people look for culprits.
As that happens, in Egypt’s case especially, the West is at serious risk of becoming a target for militant groups, a focus for new sorts of nationalism even amid a move to democracy, if or (we hope) when the Mubarak regime does fall.

Criminalizing Journalistic Activity

"Those attacking Assange are criminalizing journalistic activity." ---Mark Stephens.

Yes: indeed. The shame of it is that many in the mass media in the developed world, including the United States are making themselves active accomplices in the criminalization of normal journalistic activity. There seems to be this belief that places like the United States are beyond good and evil, when it comes to journalistic activities that their governments do not like.

Imagine, the kinds of mass media campaigns journalists and writers in the United States and other developed countries in Europe would be waging against the Iranian government, if it charged an Iranian journalist with terrorism, for releasing secret Iranian documents on its nuclear program to the New York Times, the London Times and to Google.

I thank you.

Fubara David-West.