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Obama’s farewell speech

April 28, 2016 at 9:16 am

The latest opinion poll published a few days ago in Germany indicated that 62 per cent of Germans who participated regret that US federal law does not allow President Barack Obama to run for a third term. The poll was relatively unusual, given that it was conducted in one democracy, Germany, to test public opinion about extending the rule of the president of another democracy, the United States. Its publication coincided with Obama’s “farewell” visit to Germany.

It is usual for US presidents at the end of their second term to make such visits to friendly countries. Obama’s farewell tour started in Cuba after relations between the US and the Caribbean state were resumed and normalised after more than 50 years. This will stand as one of Obama’s main achievements as president. He ended his visit to the Middle East in Saudi Arabia and a meeting with Gulf leaders. He had, you may recall, started his first term of office by making a landmark speech in Cairo in 2009, in which he called for mutual understanding between the Muslim and Western worlds.

By the time this article is published, the US president may have visited Japan, where he is expected to include a trip to the city of Hiroshima. If he does, it would be the first visit of its kind by a serving US president to the city that was the target of an American nuclear bomb in 1945.

Obama wants these visits to give the impression that he is a man of peace and reconciliation. He worked on withdrawing US troops from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and tried, as much as he could, to avoid opening new fronts. He extinguished the spark of war with Iraq that was on the verge of igniting during the rule of his predecessor, George W Bush, and also avoided, as he stated in his interview with Atlantic magazine, falling into the “trap” of ground intervention in Syria.

There is no doubt that Obama is a good reader of history, and is obsessed with what will be remembered about his 8 years in office. He was the first black president in the White House, remember, and the first to receive a Nobel Peace Prize only weeks after taking office. The “man of peace” image is regarded as his greatest obsession. However, this has been flawed by a number of positions that history cannot forget.

It is true that Obama ended a number of wars that started during previous presidencies and he refused to get involved in new wars, but that did not stop him from killing hundreds, even thousands, of innocent people in Afghanistan and Yemen with drones. These are no less devastating than “boots on the ground” wars.

Although the Obama administration was successful in finding Osama Bin Laden and killing him, as he leaves the White House he is leaving behind an enemy fiercer than Bin Laden in Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. The latter now has a pseudo-state that extends across large parts of Iraq and Syria, a “caliphate” whose authority stretches from Libya in the west to Yemen in the south and even Pakistan in the east; its human “wolves” plant death around the globe.

Furthermore, we must not forget that the Obama administration supported all of the destructive wars waged and being waged by Israel against the Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, which have killed and wounded thousands of men, women and children. His later opinion about Netanyahu’s “arrogance” and “manipulation”, which, he told Atlantic magazine, disappointed him and punctured his hopes for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, will not make up for this.

While President Obama’s Cairo speech created a lot of optimism in the Arab world, Washington’s position on the Arab disappointed many in the region. US interests dominated and dictated his administration’s position, in stark contrast to his words and principles expressed in Cairo. This will continue to be taught to students of international relations as an example of political reality overriding good intentions, which is not always a successful policy, regardless of how noble the goals were and the fact that they may well have stemmed from a genuine intention to do good.

President Obama entered the White House full of hope, noble values and good intentions, but he immediately hit the hard rock of “political reality”. This has turned all of his dreams into mere words fitting for his final farewell speech when he leaves office in a few months’ time.

 

Translated from Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, 27 April 2016.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.