Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the third in his new series on the Obama era.
Back in June, when Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, the Secret Service placed concrete barriers around his block. On November 5 they moved the barriers three blocks out.
Just last month, Obama repaired to the barbershop where he’d had his hair cut for 14 years. Last week, when he wanted a trim, the Secret Service escorted him and his barber to an undisclosed location.
For years, Obama has taken Michelle to a certain Chicago restaurant for special occasions. “It’s always just the two of them,” the restaurant’s owner told the AP last week. “Now it’s just the two of them and 30 Secret Service agents.”
In the decades since John F Kennedy was assassinated, presidential security has been doubled and redoubled. Driving around in convertibles with the roof down, as JFK and later Bobby Kennedy were wont to do, is a presidential practice that ceased long ago. Obama rides in an armoured limousine, in a convoy deploying high-tech detection and jamming devices as it goes. (If you live along his motorcade’s route, eg, don’t try to open your garage door with the remote. It won’t work until the motorcade’s passed.)
Gone, too, are the days, just a month ago, when Obama could sample a pie at a deli. Now he eats nothing that isn’t first tested for poison — just as the air of any enclosed space he’s about to enter is tested for weaponised bacteria. When GW Bush visited Liberia earlier this year, the Secret Service insisted that all the trees along the 10 miles of road between the airport and the capital be cut down.
All this sounds suspiciously like the trappings of an imperial presidency, or at least a paranoid one. But foreigners seldom appreciate how traumatized both the Secret Service and many Americans still are by the assassination of the Kennedys and King.
No security measures can make Obama completely safe, of course. As Pacino says in The Godfather: “If anything in life is certain, if history teaches us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone.” But since November 5, killing Obama has become vastly more difficult than it was before November 5.
Which may be just as well. Since the election, law enforcement officials have seen many more threats directed at Obama than at any past president-elect. From the sign in a Maine general store reading, “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool” (customers are invited to pick the date when Obama will be killed. “Let’s hope someone wins,” the sign adds), to the kids in an Idaho school bus chanting “Assassinate Obama!” there’ve been “hundreds” of incidents, says Mark Potok, director of an agency which monitors hate crimes.
On November 5, the white supremacist website, stormfront.org, acquired 2,000 new members. (“God has abandoned us,” one wrote. “This country is doomed.”) The secessionist League of the South reported its web hits jumped from 50,000 a month to 300,000 in the fortnight after November 4.
Obama’s election, says a director of the Center for the Study of the American South, is “shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries.”
Potok: “Many whites feel that the country their forefathers built has been stolen from them, so there’s in some places a real boiling rage, and that can only become worse as more people lose jobs.”
Eighty per cent of white Southerners voted for McCain. Reports the Christian Science Monitor: “In some parts of the South, there’s even talk of secession.”
There you go again.
Now, it’s easy to see all this as the impotent rage of an unreconstructed, racist South, confounded for the third or fourth time in its history. The odds of some Alabama redneck with a rifle getting to Obama are vanishingly small.
They get a little better, though, those odds, for a suicide assassin.
Both the Secret Service and the FBI are undoubtedly aware of the novel threat to al Qaeda which an Obama administration poses — and therefore of the potential counter-threat to Obama from al Qaeda, whose Ayman al-Zawahri last week startlingly declared the President-elect a “house negro… like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice,” in contrast to “honourable black Americans like Malcolm X.”
The al-Zawahri tape was both galvanic and revealing.
Consider:
By itself, the election of Barack Hussein Obama was bound to be bad news for al Qaeda, whose first struggle is still with moderate Islam. The latter had reacted to Obama’s election with amazed delight — and bin Laden and his deputy may well have concluded they had no choice but to try to wrestle away Obama’s Golden Boy image by shoving him into the ranks of America’s ‘Zionists-owned’ presidents. The al-Zawahri video included images of Obama wearing a Jewish skullcap as he met with Jewish leaders. Bin Laden’s lieutenant averred that, with Obama’s election, “America has put on a new face, but its heart full of hate, mind drowning in greed, and spirit which spreads evil, murder, repression and despotism, continue to be the same as always.”
But suppose that isn’t true?
Bin Laden and al-Zawahri know, of course, of Obama’s pledge to withdraw American troops from Iraq. If he does so, they’ll lose their main recruiting tool.
They’ll also have realized that, with an Obama administration, they should no longer hope for that further, spendthrift expenditure of American blood and treasure which a US attack on Iran would have entailed. And they’ll have considered the spectre of an unembattled Iran on Afghanistan’s border, free to indulge its natural hostility to the Taliban even as, post-Musharraf, al Qaeda’s Pakistan sanctuary becomes less secure.
They may even suspect Obama means to set about solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, an outcome that would pull the plug on al Qaeda once and for all.
Lastly, they know Obama has vowed to come after them where they are. (They also know Obama isn’t GW Bush.)
Even so, the al-Zawahri tape seemed premature and panicky; Obama isn’t yet president, he hasn’t actually done anything. And if al-Zawahri thinks he can lure African-Americans, and Third World peoples generally, away from Obama by contrasting him demeaningly with Malcolm X, he doesn’t understand African-Americans or the Third World.
Unlike Powell and Rice, who in fact served a white president, Obama is about to be President; and no one doubts he’s his own boss. Malcolm X’s was a different response, for a different time.
Al Qaeda has now made two bad mistakes. The first was to kill Iraq’s Sunnis so indiscriminately that the Sunni tribes turned on them and drove them out of al-Anbar province. (They’re currently fighting a last-ditch action in Mosul.)
And the second was to try to win the battle for hearts and minds by insulting Obama. They might as well have tried mocking Mandela.
What al-Zawahri’s videotape suggests is that, with Obama’s election — and despite the Taliban’s current successes in Afghanistan — al Qaeda fears being recast as a fringe group.
But that, after all, is the point: a radical organization can be dangerous when fighting for what it perceives to be its survival.
So, while the odds of al Qaeda getting to Obama are small, it’s probably just as well that the Secret Service remains adrenalized by memories of the Dallas book depository. (And the grassy knoll.)
