I was drinking beer with my friend Baha' the other night when the US presidential election came up. Baha' is an educated, left-wing Palestinian guy who lived in the US for a while. Like a lot of Palestinians, he is sympathetic to Barack Obama, preferring him over Hilary Clinton, but is puzzled about Obama's views on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
If Obama is supposed to represent "Change", Baha' asked me, why doesn't he stand up to the Israel lobby? Why not make a complete break with the old politics?
It's a fair question, and a complex one. It's also a question that's been underlined in the last few days with Obama's repeated statements about the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
US Presidential Candidate
c/o MSNBC.com
Your Excellency,
In one of your recent campaign interviews you stated that: "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. . . . In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them" (Interview with ABC).
This is not different from President Bush's stated policy towards Iran. The logic of threatening a total obliteration of Iran, possible only through a nuclear holocaust, is based on the "right of power", not the "power of the right".
As you may know, chapter I, article II of the United Nations Charter states that:
"All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."
Regardless of any hypothetical attack on Israel, the United States is legally bound not to threaten Iran or any other country. In addition to the UN Charter, the US constitution prohibits such threatening policies. Article IV Clause II states:
"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."
As an Iranian, I feel compelled to ask you some questions. First, why are you threatening "the Iranians"? Second, if Israel attacks Iran and you are elected as president of the USA, what would then be your policy and position?
I do not agree with the rhetorical statements and foreign policies of Dr. Ahmadinejad, the President of Islamic Republic of Iran. However, while the military capability of Iran to attack Israel is questionable, Israel's capabilities concerning the conventional and non-conventional armaments to attack Iran is beyond any doubt.
With respect
Ebrahim Yazdi,
Secretary General, Freedom Movement of Iran and
Former Foreign Minister, Islamic Republic of Iran
A film produced by the San Francisco lefty mag Mother Jones links McCain to the bigoted preacher Rod Parsley. Just as Jeremiah Wright felt compelled to speak venom to power, Reverend Parsley, who McCain describes as his "spiritual guide", doesn't shy away from spitting bile at Islam. Juicy bits include:
"America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed."
"Mohammed received revelations from demon spirits, not the living god."
"America has historically understood itself to be a bastion against Islam in the world."
"This is about to freak you out...Since September 11, 2001, 34,000 Americans have become Muslims...This means that thousands of Americans have embraced the very religion that inspired the worst assault upon their nation in a generation."
Will Parsley damage McCain as much as Wright has hurt Obama? Probably not. After all, it's far more acceptable to long for Manichean apocalypse than criticise one's own country.
Interesting findings in a recent Gallup poll: it seems Obama enjoys as much white support as John Kerry did in 2004.
It's obviously early days yet in the Obama-McCain battle, but such statistics encourage the view that Obama has in fact succeeded in building a wide coalition of support, making mince meat of the Clinton campaign's desperate suggestions on Thursday that Obama's push for the nomination rested on the backs of black voters. The following months should provide Obama the opportunity to broaden his base of support even more.
Brent Budowsky on The Hill blog sees a seismic shift in the fallout of Tuesday's primaries. Tuesday was "the night they drove old Dixie down, the night the old politics ended, the night a great new era in American politics truly began. The battle now begins in earnest. On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, the Rubicon was crossed."
The distractions and "old politics" of the Clintons have been finally laid to rest, rejected by voters tired of the hot air of the pundits and the craven pandering of hollow policies like the proposed gas tax cut. Obama's novelty will once more be allowed to rise to the fore.
But is Obama really in the clear? Has his "new politics" - which rest so much on intangibles like his strength of character - hurdled the obstacles of Wright and of "bittergate"?
We produced perhaps one-too-many grisly undead analogies yesterday, but it's tough not to when the Clinton campaign insists on providing us with so much material. Today seems no different. With one foot in the grave, Clinton's people scheduled an event in West Virginia - up for grabs in the next round of primaries - at McMurran Hall in Shepherd's University, a place made legendary in 1862 when it sheltered the bloody wounded from the carnage of the Battle of Antietam. Historical portents bode ill for Clinton, as Dana Milbank sketches in the Washington Post.
The race for the democratic nomination continued today after Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seemingly stumbled to yet another bloody draw. However, upon closer inspection the result significantly favoured Obama. A much greater margin of victory in North Carolina means that his lead over Clinton increases. With the finish line fast approaching and the candidates likely to halve the six states that are yet to go to the polls, Clinton needs something approaching a miracle, or at least an Obama slip-up that dwarfs the controversy provoked by the comments of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.
Clinton is still likely to notch up massive wins in Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. But Obama should be able to minimise the damage by gaining slightly smaller victories in Oregon, Montana and South Dakota. Clinton will likely need to win more than 80% of the delegates still in play to regain the lead. In the meantime, Obama will continue to unleash newly pledged super-delegates, demonstrating he has momentum within the party as well as the electorate.
From a faux Moorish castle in Indianapolis, Clinton still declared victory and referenced her one remaining real hope for the nomination - that delegations from Michigan and Florida be seated at the Democratic convention. Elections in these states have been declared void and Obama did not contest them, so such an outcome would seem more than a little undemocratic. Gaining the nomination like this would also damage the chances of Clinton actually being elected president.
So, advantage Obama, but this never-ending election will continue.
Barack Obama's speech on race this Tuesday is already being hailed in quarters of American public opinion as one of the finest pieces of oratory in the country's history. The embattled Democratic presidential candidate turned the pitfall of his relationship with the volatile Jeremiah Wright into a transcendent meditation on the role of race in American society and politics. Few politicians of his stature and exposure have ever dared venture into these dusty corridors of the country's identity. And few will ever be capable of both the eloquence and the probing seriousness that Obama mustered in speaking the previously unspoken (YouTube video below).
As Michael Tomasky observed in the Guardian, the speech was perhaps too brilliant for its own good. But it is a measure of its impact that the bastions of conservative thought have been unable to respond to the newness of Obama's remarks. With their knives out and the table laid, conservatives were ready to carve up the expected, feeble "distancing" act. Instead, dinner was cancelled, and Obama, resplendent in his best smoking jacket, held court in the drawing room.
Take, for instance, the bludgeon and dudgeon of FoxNews' popular "O'Reilly Factor". The grating Bill O'Reilly led both programmes on Tuesday and Wednesday nights with "Talking Points" on Obama's address. In the first, O'Reilly had the grace to praise the speech, but then asked quite curiously if "Obama's deeds matched his words" (curious in so far as the words were quite significant deeds in-and-of themselves). O'Reilly's answer was predictably "no", but only because Obama refused to appear on FoxNews. The following night, O'Reilly touched on the speech again, but only as a platform to launch a bizarre and misplaced attack on the aging Jesse Jackson. O'Reilly trotted out the familiar straw-men, failing entirely to engage with the substance of Obama's speech, probably because he didn't know how.
Nor did Dean Barnett of the neo-conservative The Weekly Standard seem to be able to parry the speech's real thrust. Barnett missed the point altogether.
Obama brilliantly answered a question that virtually no one is asking... What the analysts who are gushing over Obama's sentiments regarding race relations are missing is not only did Obama fail to accomplish the mission he needed to, he didn't even really try. He made no attempt to explain his relationship with Wright and why he hung around a man who habitually offered such hateful rhetoric. Obama instead offered a non-sequitur on race relations.
Only blinkered, wishful thinking could think of race in this context as a "non-sequitur". One of the great victories of Obama's speech is that he rose above the foam, addressing the intrinsic problems that on one level frame race relations and on a lower level generate the kind of media frenzy that made Jeremiah Wright a household name.
Never mind that Obama did more than adequately "explain his relationship with Wright" – in unflinching, human terms. Never mind that Obama's relationship to Wright should not be the preoccupation of a country mired in war, debt and division. Never mind that no Republican leaders are expected to account for their flirtations with Armageddon-seeking evangelicals. Obama cut through the chaff to address the question that should have been confronted long before. That the question was unasked is not an indictment of Obama, but of a polity (and an intelligentsia) that continues to choose fluff over fact.
One need look no further than Byron York's meek effort in the conservative National Review for an example of this kind of stilted attention. Clearly unsure of how to respond to Obama's weighty speech, he proceeded to cull quotes of support for Jeremiah Wright from members of the speech's audience, and tar Obama by association – scabrous hackery at its most desperate.
The grey lady of the right, the Wall Street Journal, seemed more equipped to weigh the import of Obama's Philadelphia address. Its editorial on the speech sought to slice through "super-structure" to a material "base" of sorts.
The Senator noted that the anger of his pastor "is real; it is powerful," and in fact it is mirrored in "white resentments." He then laid down a litany of American woe: "the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who has been laid off," the "shuttered mill," those "without health care," the soldiers who have fought in "a war that never should have been authorized and never should've been waged," etc. Thus Mr. Obama's message is we "need unity" because all Americans are victims, racial and otherwise...
And the cause of all this human misery? Why, "a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favo[u]r the few over the many." Mr. Obama's villains, in other words, are the standard-issue populist straw men of Wall Street and the GOP, and his candidacy is a vessel for liberal policy orthodoxy -- raise taxes, "invest" more in social programs, restrict trade, retreat from Iraq.
Obama's speech about race was, in effect, about material realities and histories, which he dwelled on particularly in minutes 18-22 and 28-32. Obama insisted that Wright's "anger" and the sense of alienation amongst American minorities (and other groups) was not only "real" but derived from real conditions and events. Suggesting that there are tangible culprits – the WSJ's scarecrow audience of "Wall Street straw men" – does, yes, have a whiff of the "populist" about it. But by speaking in historical and economic (and not just social) terms, Obama has set out a bolder political project, one in which a clear vision of race in America is not simply a box to tick, but an integral and necessary part.
After a successful first year Tony has passed on the torch of running the markets to me. I've joined the openDemocracy team on a voluntary basis to run the markets for 2008 – and what a year it promises to be! We're planning a series of themed months, closer integration between the markets and the openDemocracy website and we'll endeavour to post more new markets on a more regular basis this year.
A commonplace among Russia-watchers in the West is to see Putin's eight-year presidency as a retreat into autocracy after Yeltsin's chaotic experiment with freedom in the 1990s. Some hardliners even depict Putin, with his siloviki cronies (i.e. former or still serving members of the security services) as heir to the late Yuri Andropov, a KGB spymaster who went on to become Soviet leader.
“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
”
Jim Gabour Sunday Comics
James Warner Standing Perpendicular, as books do
Markha Valenta Inter Alia: religion, politics, culture
Paul Rogers on Global security 
Li Datong on China from the inside 
Mary Kaldor on Human security 
Daniele Archibugi on Cosmopolitan democracy 
