Guardian UK: Welcome Back, America

[marmar]

Welcome back
Editorial
The Guardian, Thursday November 6 2008


Think of all the seismic events to have shaken the world in the past eight years. Two wars launched, but neither over; a climate incrementally and alarmingly hotter; the worst financial crash in a century; treaties torn up; torture rationalised; detainees who disappear beyond judicial reach; the rule of international law weakened; enemies emboldened, allies undermined. Hubris was perhaps the chief sin of the outgoing US administration, leaving behind a toxic trail of detritus for the incoming one.

Now think of the president-elect of the United States. The weight of expectation that rests today on the frame of a 47-year-old senator with no real executive experience is too great for one man and, in all probability, too large for one term of office. The nearest parallels are Abraham Lincoln taking over on the brink of civil war, or Franklin Roosevelt arriving in the Great Depression. America, it seems, often reaches for a great man in its greatest need.

But if the stakes for Barack Obama are high, so too is the opportunity. Jimmy Carter argued at the Hay-on-Wye festival this year that it would take no more than 10 minutes, the time it takes to make an inaugural address, to change America's global image. Mr Carter even voiced the script: the next president should promise not to torture another prisoner, not to attack another country unless America's security was directly threatened, to honour international agreements and do the right thing on climate change. His detractors associate him with a national humiliation - the US diplomats held hostage in Iran, a loss of confidence from which it took two terms of Reagan to recover. But Mr Carter's recipe is not so wide of the mark. If the past eight years of asymmetric warfare has taught the next commander-in-chief anything, it is to appreciate the limits of hard power. It defies understanding to learn that in the three years that Nicholas Burns was the chief US negotiator on Iran, he was not allowed by his boss to meet an Iranian once. His presence at the table was supposed to be a reward for the suspension of uranium enrichment, but the policy was a nonsense. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/06/uselections2008-barackobama

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1. The last three lines are powerful. Good editorial. . . n/t