President Barack Obama, center, casts his 2012 vote during early voting at the Martin Luther King Community Center in Chicago on 25 October 2012. [Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo][/caption]
As an American expat, America’s role and reputation in the international arena is of crucial importance to me. Like my president, I believe in America’s ability to lead, and I value a multilateral foreign policy that seeks to build international consensus. International law and human rights, in my opinion, ought to inform that policy. Only in this way can the United States succeed as a leader, one that leads by setting a good example and by deferring to other leaders when the time calls for it.
Less than four years ago, when Barack Obama entered the Whitehouse as the first African-American president in US history, I was convinced of his commitment to redefine American power in this image.
[inset_left]It became clear that Obama was too inexperienced to know the limits of his power as well as the risks he would be willing to take to be a man of his word[/inset_left]
Generally speaking, Obama has succeeded in advancing important elements of this approach, such as his adherence to what Charles Kupchan and Bruce Jentleson term “principled pragmatism” in Chatham House’s The World Today, where they argue that “Obama’s embrace of multilateralism has shored up America’s alliances around the globe” through teamwork and consensus-building. This is highly commendable, and I wish it to continue.
Yet, like most leaders grappling with the discrepancy between aspiration and reality, Obama has selectively applied the values and virtues he pledged allegiance to in many of his speeches and writings. This was in part because he could not apply them, but also because he chose not to.
My feelings can be summed up in the following statement made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Yes, I do hold my elected leaders to such standards. When judging Obama’s past four years in office, three areas of concern stand out: defense, Palestinian aspirations for a state, and US support for oppressive governments.
On so-called US defense, the Obama Administration has implemented a program that actually seeks out potential future enemies of the state and then assassinates them based on whether they exhibit suspicious behavioral patterns. When the target is Al-Qaeda or “affiliated” with Al-Qaeda, the administration invokes 9/11—thereby employing the same logic that Osama bin Laden used when justifying “defensive” attacks on the US.
Condemned by the UN Human Rights Council as a possible violation of international law, President Obama’s drone program not only sets a dangerous precedent, but it also destroys America’s reputation among ordinary people while empowering unrepresentative governments to make decisions directly affecting their citizens—as many as 4,000 people have been killed in US drone strikes since 2002 in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, for example. A significant proportion of those were civilians.
On Palestinian state-building, all that needs to be said is that the administration’s political and financial support for Israel has spelled disaster for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The administration went as far as to punish the Palestinian Authority for seeking full member-state status at the UN last year, even though its position and the position of several administrations before it has been an expressed support for a Palestinian state.
This takes us to America’s political and financial support of oppressive governments, a category that Israel falls under, along with Pakistan and others. These “allies” are all top aid recipients and are known to misuse US aid and weapons to commit human rights abuses against their own populations.
From an Arab and Muslim perspective, Obama’s failures start and end with his Cairo speech. Not long after, it became clear that Obama was too inexperienced to know the limits of his power as well as the risks he would be willing to take to be a man of his word, just as many of us were so hungry for change that we ignored real world decisions and the human drive to remain in power above all else.
These are some of the reasons why I did not vote for Obama, but admittedly, I am relieved that he won.
