Barack Obama

After Iowa and New Hampshire the nation will now finally entertain the very real possibility of an African American president. Or rather, a president who happens to be African American.
No longer a distant dream, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has energized the 2008 presidential race with such force that David Brooks used one of his columns to announce that an earthquake had rocked the American political landscape.
With breathless excitement, Brooks gushed, “When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say No?“ And there’s the rub.
While Barack Obama presidential bid has energized an already energized democratic base and promises to bring more youth and independents onto the political scene, Brooks’s less than critical assessment is emblematic of the profound crisis that has afflicted the white intellectual class.
After the events of September 11, 2001, the world of the white intellectual was suddenly turned upside down. The bombings, death, and terror that stalked the everyday lives of the vast majority of people living in foreign locales with exotic names came crashing on the shores of America.
No longer was the United States immune to the calamity and chaos unleashed by those intent on killing others while sacrificing themselves. For the white intellectual, the terrible events of that day made “all that was solid melt into air.“
The warrior response of President Bush was at first attractive for an intellectual class that desired a firm reaffirmation of American power in the world.
However, as the dreams of a newly stabilized world vanished into a repulsive nightmare of war without end, white intellectuals were forced to confront a world that did not conform to their preconceived ideas not to mention an administration that decidedly refused to abide by what is generally held to be the norms and rules of the American political system.
Indeed, the fiasco in Iraq, the rejection of America by its European allies, and the international isolation of the nation has exacerbated the anxieties of the white intellectual who now faces that which s/he most deeply represses the inability of American democracy to live up to its professed ideals.
Thus, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama comes at one of the darkest moments for the white intellectual.
And it is here where we come to understand why Obama’s run for the presidency has been hailed by the white intellectual.
Obama’s campaign slogan “change we can believe in“ resonates with the white intellectual that yearns to believe again. In many ways, the substance of Obama’s policy positions is incidental to the many meanings that have been attributed to the symbolic status of his candidacy. Writing in the wake of Obama’s Iowa tsunami Maureen Dowd offered this emblematic commentary: “The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again.“
It is his soaring rhetoric, his effusive smile, and his audacious presence that enables the white intellectual to believe in American democracy once again.
Despite what some take as President Bush’s messianic vision of himself and his presidency, the white intellectual believed in President Bush and his agenda in the aftermath of September 11th.
But soon a creeping skepticism caused the white intellectual to jettison this belief in the wake of a protracted war in Iraq, the multiple assaults on civil liberties by the Bush administration, and the chaos and confusion engulfing Afghanistan and Pakistan.
With the meteoric rise of Obama’s presidential campaign and its belief driven rhetoric of change, white intellectuals are able to believe again. Such a belief mirrors the beliefs that animate those more religiously attuned citizens with the notable exceptions of the lack of any overt theological commitments and any relation with organized protestant Christianity. In other words, for the white intellectual Obama is the messiah without messianism.
Obama’s call for a politics of transcendence be it partisanship or the past speaks most directly to the desires of the white intellectual to be free not only of the politics of the present, but more importantly the past itself. In the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan remarks, “Unlike any of the other candidates, [Obama] could take Americaðfinallyðpast the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.“
Corey DB Walker
COUNTERPUNCH.COM

The tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan have rarely submitted to outside rule. That is why Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders are there. This, in turn, is why US Special Forces and the CIA have been talking openly about conducting covert operations in Pakistan.
That idea has been rejected robustly by President Pervez Musharraf who warned that any such attack by the Americans would be seen as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty-- and consequently resisted.
As Musharraf himself pointed out, it is for the Pakistan authorities, and them alone, to deal with the tribal areas.
Yet there is something rather contrived about this whole exchange. Why should the Americans have started thinking aloud about covert operations? Why should they seem to say that they have not yet actually mounted an anti-Al-Qaeda operation in Pakistan’s tribal areas when there is strong evidence of at least two incursions?
And having publicly raised the possibility that they might violate Pakistan’s borders, the Americans were then able to put forward a senior officer who said that, of course, such incursions could only happen with the blessing of Islamabad.
The affair has also given Musharraf the opportunity to publicly talk tough to the Americans, even alluding to the possibility that Pakistani troops might take on any invading Americans.
The reality, however, is that the areas in which US Special Forces might operate are empty of Pakistani troops. Some might, therefore, suspect that this whole exchange was a not-too-sophisticated piece of political theater dreamed up by Washington to make them sound good while boosting Musharraf’s domestic political stock.
None of this, of course, addresses the issue of what can be done to deprive Al-Qaeda and the Taliban of their refuges in Pakistan. If the Taliban cannot be defeated militarily in their mountain fastnesses any more than they themselves will again be able to march back to power, then it is clear that only negotiations can bring peace. The Americans don’t agree to talks with the Taliban. British attempts to do deals in Afghanistan have angered Washington, especially when the Afghan elders later reneged.
Yet it was precisely because the Americans opened dialogue with Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq that these men turned against Al-Qaeda and began to swing the tide of violence in favor of the Iraqi government and their American backers.
The same common sense needs to be deployed in Pakistan. If the Taliban are included in the Afghan political process, are talked to and listened to, they will no longer need the refuge offered, generally by their fellow Pashtuns, along the frontier. At that point the Al-Qaeda bigots would once again become exposed as their former covering support would be removed.
All the covert operations in the world are not going to break the Taliban in Pakistan. Indeed, the greater the military pressure, the tougher and more obdurate they will become. Words--not bullets--are the only way to stop this violence.
ARABNEWS.COM