Wednesday, June 9, 2010

I-catcher Console-web Moniter'

obamamonamour

Obama and young century.
by Carlos Fuentes.

PART.

President Barack Obama is attacked from many corners. Is a "socialist" who wants to extend a suffocating power of government. It is a "reactionary" that limits on public power and favors private enterprise. It is a political "person" that he would take Clinton's activism. It is a political "cold" that would be missing, however, Bush's populist demagoguery.

Actually, Obama is a new policy for a new time. This simple truth is hard to accept in a country, the United States, accustomed to the old politics of the past.

A bit of history.

early twentieth century, two presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, had a policy of intervention limited to the Caribbean and Mexico. In Europe, three cousins \u200b\u200b(the Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and King George V), grandchildren of Queen Victoria, fought for different reasons. Germany and England (and France) had overseas colonies. Russia had a vast territory. The Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled the Balkans and central Europe. The Ottoman Empire stretched from the Balkans to Mesopotamia. How to be shared, for whom, the power in Europe, Asia and Africa? What rights would the countries subject to one or more of the imperial centers?

a spark would be enough - Sarajevo and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand - to set fire to Europe in a useless war, which killed twenty million beings and as many wounded, only to meet the rivalry between a small group of families ...

The novelty of the war is that in 1917 the United States for the first time in its history, came to fight in a European conflict. The pretext was the sinking of the steamer Lusitania by German torpedo boats (and, perhaps, the Kaiser's relationship with Mexico and the Zimmermann telegram offering return to Mexico from Texas, New Mexico and Arizona). Wilson served, after the war, a "Samaritan diplomacy," as Daniel Boorstin calls, culminating in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) dismembered the Turkish and Austrian empires, drove to Germany of its colonies and imposed humiliating conditions to Reich: loss of land, onerous war reparations, prohibition to rearm.

Versailles Del domestic resentment against National Socialism came to Hitler. The rearmament of Germany and anti-Semitic policies of Hitler antieslavas led to World War II, this itself because it was justified to stop a barbaric totalitarian expansionism incomparable. The United States entered the conflict after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and President Franklin Roosevelt ended a policy that, in its Latin American dimension, had resigned the previous intervention in favor of a policy of "good neighbor" that the same is carried with the revolutionary government of Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico with the Popular Front of the Left in Chile to Brazil's Getulio Vargas corporatism. What tropical dictators?

-Somoza is a son of a bitch - Roosevelt said - but he's our bastard.

good neighbor policy was continued by Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, in the post-atomic war and was brutally interrupted by his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, toppling the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, on behalf of "a glorious victory" for democracy, said Chancellor Foster Dulles.

The Roosevelt-Truman era ended, locked in the refrigerator of the Cold War. Former dictatorships in the Caribbean and Central America were protected. The new dictators (Pinochet, Videla) were supported. They had only declared "anti-communist" to win favor with Washington and criminal impunity. The Cuban revolution had stressed this policy: communism at the gates of the United States. Goulart's government fell in Brazil on suspicion of philo-communism. Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina succumbed to regimes of torture, murder and disappearances.

Carter sought a change. Clinton confirmed it: The Cold War was over. But the United States, Manichaean, he needed an enemy. You have to know who the bad to be, we the good. The end of the Cold War deprived Washington of Soviet contender. Where was now the indispensable enemy?

The attacks of September 11, 2001 gave the answer. The United States gave themselves the right to preemptive attack. In the absence of evidence against Iraq, the fallacy of "preemptive strike" was found. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Bush and Blair deceived the world. As there were no weapons, it was claimed that Saddam was conspiring with terrorists. As Saddam was, in fact, enemy of the terrorists, it became clear that the invasion of Iraq was to benefit the companies associated with Vice President Dick Cheney, Bechtel, Halliburton.

not matter and Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in full:

- The United States acts according to its own national interests, not those of an illusory international community.

Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo, torture, illegal detention, but also restricting the rights of American citizens. "Take it or leave it" Bush said of his policy, "with us or against us. It does not matter."

These are the policies that predate President Obama. What it offer instead?



PART.

In his message of 27 May on National Security of the United States, Barack Obama rejected the policy of preemptive attack, torture and violation of rights, his predecessor George W. Bush, to which I referred earlier in this article.

Obama, by contrast, moves - subtly, with caution - the global role of the United States. Indicates that the American nation can not, by itself, bear the challenges of the new century. "Our adversaries," he adds, "want an America diminished powers because of the over-extension."

Explicitly Chief U.S. State includes as co-participants of the global order in China, India, Brazil and Russia. "We are committed to widening the circle of actors responsible," he added in a turn to the geopolitical realities of the twenty-first century, in no way detract from the U.S. leadership, but recognizes that shares responsibilities and new forces. Until recently, Brazil, China and India were relegated to "third world." Not anymore. Obama gives the place they deserve in the first world.

But the United States to maintain its power, would take over the national economy, education, energy, science, and climate change. The country's security depends on it and was not given the armed defense, much less the military offense, but Obama, if you do not mention the use of preventive force, nor excluded. Simply, unlike Bush, gives priority to the diplomatic options. "The use of force is sometimes necessary," Obama said. "But we must first exhaust the pre-war options, weigh carefully the costs and risks of inaction."

Arguably, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan contradicts these purposes, while the output of Afghan territory of the United States is scheduled for next year. Go dilemma. The weak and corrupt government of Karzai is a lead weight. The reality is Afghanistan belongs, not the government in Kabul, but the Pashtuns, Hazaras and other tribal confederations, as well as the Taliban insurgency terrorists associated with Al-Qaeda. Can you break this partnership? Can you negotiate with the Taliban without Al-Qaeda? Is it possible to reach an agreement with the tribes? "The tribes are stronger than the Taliban?

As in Mexico to 1915 - with all the differences - Afghanistan provides difficult and contradictory ways that test the diplomatic and military capacity of the Government of Obama. Did not overlook this fact, and bring to mind a recent conversation with a British military: - The British We Friends of the population. The Americans occupy the country and think in terms of high strategy, not personal relationships.

If this is true, then it becomes even more important is the fact to include Brazil, China, India and Russia in the overall management of diplomacy. So, what can countries do to alleviate the weight above the U.S. military in Afghanistan, reduce the threat of Iran and protect civil society in Iran, neutralize terrorists in Pakistan and to direct the Government of Islamabad at a rate transparent freedoms without bad company?

Russian Obama offers "a stable, substantive and multifaceted." China would play calls "responsible leadership." He does not say at all, you can not say, because the United States used to be number one, with difficulty accept that now are only the strongest country in a new constellation of power.

I wonder, moreover, that the American right-wing extremists, they discover too late the true Barack Obama. Nothing that the president is doing is different than it offered to take power.

• Maintain credit for growth, but subject to the Banking Act, reducing excessive profits.
· democratize finance and channel more resources to other sectors of the economy.
· To update the outdated systems of financial relationship.
· Extend the time of school education. More
· Educate the workforce to better compete with China, Brazil, India and Korea.
· Employment better and more widely the country's energy resources.
• Eliminate the gap in pay between men and women.
• Better jobs, better wages, better distribution of wealth.
· Reform of the public health system.
• Close the gap between the status quo and future needs. Obama Adds

his critics say the country can not digest so much in so little time, and his critics opposed say he has done too much too soon.

Obama, President tranquil, simply responds that nothing in the political process from taking difficult decisions today, however, will be present in ten or twenty years.

Notably, it has already achieved two goals that did not achieve their predecessors. First, the reform in favor of a national public health system. Second, financial reform and the reduction of the excessive power of the bench.

It is still remarkable that, in light of such successes in less than two years in office, Obama is criticized, not for what he did, but it still has not done. The tranquility, the absence of rhetoric balcony of Barack Obama announces reforms still remain before the United States lost the illusions of the twentieth century and enter a firm foothold to twenty-first century.