02-23-2008, 02:52 AM
Looks like thinking folks are doing what we on the forum have been looking at. Hope now people understand why there should be interest in foreign elections.
from Deccan Chronicle, 23 Feb., 2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>India must know its Mccain and Obama </b>
By V. Balachandran
In May 1981, <b>our embassy in Paris was not mentally prepared for Francois Mitterrandâs victory over Giscard dâEstaing as President</b>. Our ambassador frankly admitted that he knew no one in the Socialist Party. A similar situation arose in 1992, when a Congress Party delegation from Delhi wanted to visit Little Rock to felicitate Bill Clinton. <b>Our embassy in Washington DC, which never thought of developing contacts with the President-Electâs group,</b> had to search deep inside Arkansas to locate an Indian American doctor to facilitate a meeting with Clinton.
Bureaucracy is notorious for its inability to anticipate new situations as Laurence J. Peter (The Peter Principle) said: <b>"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status." </b>A similar situation should not arise in November 2008 if John McCain is to clash for the high office with Barack Obama, now buoyed with the triple "Potomac" victory on February 12, unless derailed by Hillary Clintonâs superdelegates.
The contrast between the two could not have been sharper. John Sidney McCain III will be the oldest President if elected (72), while Barack Hussein Obama "Junior" (Barry) will be the fifth youngest (47). McCain, a highly decorated soldier, comes from an illustrious family of naval officers. <b>Nicknamed "McNasty" in the Navy, he was fearless but rebellious, a tendency he has displayed even during his Congressional term since 1982, where he was considered a maverick because of his speeches and actions.</b> But he was a national hero, showing the highest leadership quality in refusing to be released on priority ahead of his comrades when he was a prisoner of war for six years in Vietnam where he was often tortured.
Iraq will be the central issue for McCain and Obama for different reasons. <b>McCain believes in a militarist Jacksonian model of foreign policy on unilateral overseas intervention if American interests are threatened. His ideas conveyed through Foreign Affairs (November-December 2007) go beyond the Bush and Cheney doctrine of a military and civilian "surge" in Iraq, strengthening Pervez Musharraf in defeating Taliban, organising unilateral or multilateral sanctions on Iran, supporting Israel against its enemies, increasing US military muscle by raising US Army and Marine troop level to 900,000 and setting up a new Second World War type OSS to fight unconventional warfare and covert operations to "take risks that ⦠bureaucracies today rarely consider taking." McCain wants a new US information agency to defeat Islamic extremism, the creation of a "worldwide League of Democracies" as envisioned by Theodore Roosevelt, to take over when the United Nations fails, close cooperation with European Union and cementing a growing partnership with India.</b>
Obama "Junior" comes from a lower middle class family where the burden of raising children fell on his mother and grandmother. Barack Hussein Obama "Senior" hailed from a remote Kenyan village. In 1959 he was selected for a US scholarship to Hawaii University where he met a White student, Ann Dunham from Kansas. Their marriage lasted only till 1963 when he moved to Harvard to study economics. He returned to Kenya with another American wife, became an alcoholic and died in a car accident in 1982. Later Obama would pen a sensitive sketch of how he missed his father in his best-selling book Dreams from My Father (1995) remembering that "more than half of USAâs 5.6 million black boys lived in fatherless households, 40 per cent of them impoverished."
Ann Dunham then married an Indonesian student, moved to Jakarta in 1967 where Obama studied in Indonesian schools spending four years of "joyous time, full of adventure and mystery" as he wrote in his second book The Audacity of Hope (2006), another best-seller. Always at the top of his class at Harvard Law School, he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1991. His anti-Iraq War speech in Chicago in October 2002 at a time when he was considering running for the US Senate and when 28 Democratic senators had voted for the proposed war, was a great risk, but it paid off. His impressive keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, despite being a state legislator, won him instant fame.
The Audacity of Hope contains his political philosophy of "empathy and inclusiveness." <b>Chapter 8, "The World Beyond Our Borders" contains his foreign policy scheme. He credits the post-Second World War American leadership of crafting "a new architecture combining Wilsonâs idealism with hard headed realism" which saw its results after 60 years. However "American foreign policy has always been a jumble of warring impulses." Nationalist movements, ethnic struggles, reform efforts or left leaning policies were viewed through Cold War lenses and considered potential threats, since, "US policymakers unnecessarily viewed problems elsewhere in the world through a military lens rather than a diplomatic one." The post 9/11 policies were old and outdated strategies, "dusted off, slapped together and with new labels affixed."
On the other hand, he decries "isolationism," since globalisation has made the US economy, health and security captive to events outside. Also, such transnational threats are from "the margins of the global economy," through weak or failing states, corruption and poverty which the US had earlier ignored. Unilateral military action should only be when US faces imminent threat. In all other cases, a multilateral action on the lines of George H.W. Bushâs First Gulf War should be undertaken, with cooperation from other countries. "Freedom means more than elections" in many parts of the world reeling under poverty. He faults US trade barriers, patent regimes and World Bank-IMF policies for depriving the poor access to drugs, food and development.</b>
Obamaâs July 2007 declaration in Charleston that he would meet the leaders of Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea in the first year of office to resolve differences, was attacked by Hillary Clinton as "naïve." <b>However, for a world tired of the present American policy which creates more problems, this would come as a breath of fresh air. Also, it would prove that Obama is the "future" while Clinton is the "past."</b> Would US electors choose a further dose of militarism or "empathy and inclusiveness"?
V. Balachandran is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat
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from Deccan Chronicle, 23 Feb., 2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>India must know its Mccain and Obama </b>
By V. Balachandran
In May 1981, <b>our embassy in Paris was not mentally prepared for Francois Mitterrandâs victory over Giscard dâEstaing as President</b>. Our ambassador frankly admitted that he knew no one in the Socialist Party. A similar situation arose in 1992, when a Congress Party delegation from Delhi wanted to visit Little Rock to felicitate Bill Clinton. <b>Our embassy in Washington DC, which never thought of developing contacts with the President-Electâs group,</b> had to search deep inside Arkansas to locate an Indian American doctor to facilitate a meeting with Clinton.
Bureaucracy is notorious for its inability to anticipate new situations as Laurence J. Peter (The Peter Principle) said: <b>"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status." </b>A similar situation should not arise in November 2008 if John McCain is to clash for the high office with Barack Obama, now buoyed with the triple "Potomac" victory on February 12, unless derailed by Hillary Clintonâs superdelegates.
The contrast between the two could not have been sharper. John Sidney McCain III will be the oldest President if elected (72), while Barack Hussein Obama "Junior" (Barry) will be the fifth youngest (47). McCain, a highly decorated soldier, comes from an illustrious family of naval officers. <b>Nicknamed "McNasty" in the Navy, he was fearless but rebellious, a tendency he has displayed even during his Congressional term since 1982, where he was considered a maverick because of his speeches and actions.</b> But he was a national hero, showing the highest leadership quality in refusing to be released on priority ahead of his comrades when he was a prisoner of war for six years in Vietnam where he was often tortured.
Iraq will be the central issue for McCain and Obama for different reasons. <b>McCain believes in a militarist Jacksonian model of foreign policy on unilateral overseas intervention if American interests are threatened. His ideas conveyed through Foreign Affairs (November-December 2007) go beyond the Bush and Cheney doctrine of a military and civilian "surge" in Iraq, strengthening Pervez Musharraf in defeating Taliban, organising unilateral or multilateral sanctions on Iran, supporting Israel against its enemies, increasing US military muscle by raising US Army and Marine troop level to 900,000 and setting up a new Second World War type OSS to fight unconventional warfare and covert operations to "take risks that ⦠bureaucracies today rarely consider taking." McCain wants a new US information agency to defeat Islamic extremism, the creation of a "worldwide League of Democracies" as envisioned by Theodore Roosevelt, to take over when the United Nations fails, close cooperation with European Union and cementing a growing partnership with India.</b>
Obama "Junior" comes from a lower middle class family where the burden of raising children fell on his mother and grandmother. Barack Hussein Obama "Senior" hailed from a remote Kenyan village. In 1959 he was selected for a US scholarship to Hawaii University where he met a White student, Ann Dunham from Kansas. Their marriage lasted only till 1963 when he moved to Harvard to study economics. He returned to Kenya with another American wife, became an alcoholic and died in a car accident in 1982. Later Obama would pen a sensitive sketch of how he missed his father in his best-selling book Dreams from My Father (1995) remembering that "more than half of USAâs 5.6 million black boys lived in fatherless households, 40 per cent of them impoverished."
Ann Dunham then married an Indonesian student, moved to Jakarta in 1967 where Obama studied in Indonesian schools spending four years of "joyous time, full of adventure and mystery" as he wrote in his second book The Audacity of Hope (2006), another best-seller. Always at the top of his class at Harvard Law School, he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1991. His anti-Iraq War speech in Chicago in October 2002 at a time when he was considering running for the US Senate and when 28 Democratic senators had voted for the proposed war, was a great risk, but it paid off. His impressive keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, despite being a state legislator, won him instant fame.
The Audacity of Hope contains his political philosophy of "empathy and inclusiveness." <b>Chapter 8, "The World Beyond Our Borders" contains his foreign policy scheme. He credits the post-Second World War American leadership of crafting "a new architecture combining Wilsonâs idealism with hard headed realism" which saw its results after 60 years. However "American foreign policy has always been a jumble of warring impulses." Nationalist movements, ethnic struggles, reform efforts or left leaning policies were viewed through Cold War lenses and considered potential threats, since, "US policymakers unnecessarily viewed problems elsewhere in the world through a military lens rather than a diplomatic one." The post 9/11 policies were old and outdated strategies, "dusted off, slapped together and with new labels affixed."
On the other hand, he decries "isolationism," since globalisation has made the US economy, health and security captive to events outside. Also, such transnational threats are from "the margins of the global economy," through weak or failing states, corruption and poverty which the US had earlier ignored. Unilateral military action should only be when US faces imminent threat. In all other cases, a multilateral action on the lines of George H.W. Bushâs First Gulf War should be undertaken, with cooperation from other countries. "Freedom means more than elections" in many parts of the world reeling under poverty. He faults US trade barriers, patent regimes and World Bank-IMF policies for depriving the poor access to drugs, food and development.</b>
Obamaâs July 2007 declaration in Charleston that he would meet the leaders of Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea in the first year of office to resolve differences, was attacked by Hillary Clinton as "naïve." <b>However, for a world tired of the present American policy which creates more problems, this would come as a breath of fresh air. Also, it would prove that Obama is the "future" while Clinton is the "past."</b> Would US electors choose a further dose of militarism or "empathy and inclusiveness"?
V. Balachandran is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->