Levellers

If Obama Becomes President: Realistic Hopes & Obstacles for Peace & Justice

I have already sent an email similar to this blog post to several email lists of peace groups. I have been a “peace and justice activist” since my conversion to Christian pacifism and subsequent discharge from the U.S. Army (1983) as a conscientious objector to all war and preparation for war. In that time, I have found that peace activists in the U.S. (maybe also elsewhere) tend to be purists about political candidates. This leads to 2 patterns that I want to discourage: Type 1 says (sometimes for theological reasons) that all presidents or prime ministers or politicians are alike–or too close to worry about. The differences are shades of gray. Peace activists should not waste their time trying to get any particular candidate elected. Type 2 tends to think a particular candidate can become a cure-all or peace messiah: If we just this person elected, we can put away our signs and civil disobedience and war tax resistance and strategies for mediation, etc., etc. because all will be well.

I have strong arguments against both attitudes. No politician is anywhere near perfect. All are at times hypocritical or pander for votes or, at the least, are inconsistent. But sometimes the choice between candidates and/or parties is clear. I think this is one of those times. I think a President Obama would mostly be an ally to peacemakers–but would have to be pushed in some areas. I think that a President McCain would have peacemakers mostly on the defensive as Bush has–trying to cushion or prevent the worst of his policies. A President Obama will disappoint us as a candidate Obama already has, at times. But I do think it worthwhile for peace activists, including Christian peace activists, to work hard to get him elected, staffing phone banks, contributing money, knocking on doors, registering voters, etc. But not because he will be anything close to a pacifist.

Should Sen. Obama become President Obama, what realistic hopes and what obstacles to peace and justice can we expect?

• He will end the U.S. occupation of Iraq. This is, by itself, a huge reason to work for his election rather than John 100 Years McCain’s. Ending the occupation will be messy. The troops will probably only be pulled back to Kuwait or Qatar and some will be redeployed to Afghanistan. We must work to insist on rebuilding Iraq and we peacemakers must push for an international UN peacekeeping force (and/or work with groups like Christian Peacemaker Teams or Nonviolence International, Peace Brigades International, etc. to for 3rd party non-violent intervention and work at reconciliation between Sunni and Shi’ia and Kurd). The temporary reduction of violence from the troop “surge” seems to have ended and violence is once more on the upswing. But if more chaos follows the exit of our troops, the Right will clamor for their return. Obama is committed to ending the occupation, but he has repeatedly stated that it won’t be easy. We can be hopeful, but want to give all the help we can to ensuring the building of a peaceful, prosperous, free and secure Iraq in the aftermath of the war and occupation.
• Afghanistan. I think we have to brace ourselves for the fact that Obama will increase troops and other resources to Afghanistan. Besides the pursuit of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, this will be mostly in a support capacity. Our task as citizen peacemakers from around the globe will be to seek nonviolent alternatives in nation-building, hoping that an exit from Afghanistan without leaving it a failed state will be possible in the near future.
• Pakistan. I think Obama will be guided by those like Joe Biden who want to support the Pakistani democracy by building schools and other development projects. His willingness to bomb the tribal territories along the Afghan border in pursuit of Al-Qaeda is a real concern and we need to see what we can do to provide alternatives. I do think an Obama presidency will help more than McCain for the U.S. to become an even handed broker between Pakistan and India over both Kashmir and nukes, instead of the one-sided support for India on these matters that has been our policy.
• I have now heard 3 Obama speeches to the American Israeli Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and all of them showed me that he has no real empathy for Palestinian suffering. He tilts toward the Right where Israel is concerned–and not just to win Jewish votes, I think, although the tone of his most recent rhetoric is probably a response to McCain’s attacks. He HAS committed himself to a 2 state peace settlement within the 1967 borders. He has said nothing about the WALL and his most recent remarks about Jerusalem as the capitol, instead of a shared city, were very unfortunate. We will have to work hard here for a true just peace–and part of that will include working to change the shape of the debate in our society. We will have to give him the political climate that can make work to heal BOTH Israel AND Palestine something he can advocate without ushering in a new Right in Congress or the White House. Obama did promise to work throughout his presidency, not just at the end, for a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. Although I am always against demonizing folk, I am glad that Hamas renounced its “endorsement” of his candidacy–something that just played into the hands of the Right here and in Israel.
• Latin America. This is one of the most under-reported, but truly progressive, dimensions to Obama’s foreign policy. Go to his website and check it out–and hear his speech before the Cuban-Americans in Miami. He is against NAFTA and voted against CAFTA because of lack of protections for unions and for the environment–and he knows that the weaknesses of those agreements have led directly to the increase in illegal immigration here. But he knows that global trade will play a part in all U.S.-Latin American relations and supported the pact with Peru as having the necessary protections–whether he was right or wrong, it shows his willingness to make distinctions and find common ground. He is not quite a member of the Fair Trade movement, but he is closer to that than to the Free Trade fundamentalists. He is committed to ending the civil war in Columbia and he sees Venezuala’s Hugo Chavez as a possibly dangerous adversary, but not as a demon. He wants step-by-step normalization with Cuba, but will leave the embargo on, at first, as a lever to help encourage more democratic reforms. (I think the embargo is a complete waste, but I like the fact that Obama is thinking in step-by-step fashion and focusing on behavior change, rather than regime change.)
• I think his speeches and actions can lead us to expect reasonably hard-nosed diplomatic engagement with Iran (he is pushing for disinvestment of Iran if it does not renounce its nuclear energy program), Syria, North Korea, Russia and China. His approach is classic “carrot or stick” politics, but seems to work for more carrot than stick.
• Obama has been one of the strongest Senators working to stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan; the Democratic Republic of Congo; and to end the military dictatorship in Burma/Myanmar. He definitely prefers diplomacy and economic and political sanctions to military intervention–and international UN peacekeeping to go-it-alone policies by the U.S. However, I think peace folk need to work to educate him more on the practices of just peacemaking so that he is not boxed into a debate framed as “do nothing vs. military intervention.”
• I think we can expect a definitely stronger commitment to the United Nations and other post-WWII international institutions for peace, development, and security. We can expect (and urge) him to sign the cluster-bomb ban, the ban on landmines, re-sign the ABM Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Possibly, he would also sign the Treaty of Rome that commits the U.S. to the International Criminal Court, but if he pushes too fast on this one, there could be a Right wing backlash.
• I don’t think we can expect any deep cuts in military spending his first term. In fact, in terms of troop strength, armor and equipment, and conventional weapons, we should expect Obama to push for increases. Toward the end of his first term, we MIGHT get him behind cutting the wasteful “Star Wars” missile defense and other cold war weapons with no practical use in today’s world, including deep, multi-lateral cuts in nukes. But people in this country are still fearful and fear leads to imperialistic and militaristic actions. To get these kinds of cuts (which we need), we are going to have to work to create the kind of political atmosphere and discourse which leads to “strength through peace” rather than “peace through greater firepower.” Before we as citizen activists (including religious leaders) create such an atmosphere, any president which moved to make deep cuts in weaponry would lose at the polls and we’d end up with another Neo-Con regime. Too fast a movement can create a backlash.
• For the same reason, I don’t expect a President Obama to show any enthusiasm for a Dept. of Peace. The campaign for this will have to be through Congress–I doubt he would veto it. The same goes for the creation of the Peace Tax Fund for conscientious objectors to be able to pay all of their taxes without any going for war. An Obama presidency would not be as committed to these kinds of actions as, say, a Dennis Kucinich would be.

A later post will outline my thoughts on what progressives can reasonably expect in domestic policies from a President Obama.

Presidents are not magic wands. Citizenship involves more than casting a vote every 4 years. So does the work of peace with justice. We will have plenty of petitions to Congress, letters to the editor, sermons, speeches, demonstrations, independent projects that have no government support (and maybe government opposition) that show new ways of approach, etc., etc. But it seems obvious to me that engaging in all that, in our peace teaching, our counter-recruitment, our citizen-diplomacy meetings, our nonviolent campaigns, etc., that we would have a much more supportive context for this kind of work Barack Obama in the White House (and, I hope, Bill Richardson as Sec. of State!) than with John McCain there. John McCain, like George W. Bush, would keep peacemakers constantly on defense, trying to curb the worst excesses of bad polices.

The contrast leads me to believe that peace activists, faith-based and otherwise, should work hard for the election of Sen. Obama as the next president of the United States–with plenty of hope, but eyes realistically wide open and prepared for disappointments and set backs even if he is elected. Our true work goes on, no matter who is in power–but that doesn’t make elections irrelevant or unimportant.

Jim Wallis likes to say that rather than trying to change one politician with his or her finger to the wind, we should work on changing the direction of the wind.  I think that in Obama we have the opportunity to elect someone who knows that new winds are coming and wants to encourage them.  That’s worth working hard for between now and November 4th–although electoral politics will always be only one dimension of the work for peace, especially from a Kingdom of God perspective.

June 7, 2008 Posted by Michael Westmoreland-White | economic justice, foreign policy, peacemaking, U.S. politics | 21 Comments