The world on his plate

Ten months ago, when John McCain suggested that rival Barack Obama join him in suspending his campaign to make a dramatic dash back to Washington to ‘fix’ the US’s suddenly looming financial catastrophe, Obama declined. A president, he said coolly, ought to be able to do more than one thing at a time. Since January 20 Obama has been having to prove his point.

Given the mess in which the Bush-Cheney administration left the US and the world, it could hardly have been otherwise, but Obama seems to relish multi-tasking on a scale that few US presidents have had to deal with before. The big legislative achievement of his first weeks in office was securing passage of a near-trillion dollar stimulus package (and many economists think he’ll have to do it again soon). Currently he’s pushing his revolutionary Health Care Reform plan, passage of which will require him to take on and defeat such powerful lobbies as the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry, and their voices in Congress — and not all of the latter are Republican, by any means.

Meantime, however, the world outside the US has not considerately stood still. Here’s the current state of play in some of the crises with which the president has to deal on a daily basis.

Honduras:

Last weekend’s military coup in Honduras ousted President Manuel Zelaya, reportedly for defying that country’s Supreme Court and preparing to hold a referendum on reforming the constitution which would probably give him the right to run for office again next year, as Venezuela’s Chávez and his allies in Bolivia and Ecuador have done.

The situation was complex. On one hand, the military could claim the overthrow was justified: Zelaya was transgressing against both Honduras’ institutions and its constitution. On the other hand, Zelaya, having taken office as a dime-a-dozen rightwing Latin American leader, had converted while in office, moved to left of centre, and become close to Chávez, whose subsidized oil was supporting his regime.

Chávez wasted no time in accusing the CIA of having orchestrated Zelaya’s overthrow. The same day, however, Obama, noting that the US “has not always stood as it should” with Latin American democracies (a clear reference to the CIA’s 1970 overthrow of Chile’s Allende), condemned the coup as illegal and called for Zelaya’s return to office. That refreshing stance put him and Chávez on the same side of the issue (and doubtless left the latter nonplussed). Obama also insisted that the OAS lead the effort to have Zelaya reinstated, living up to the pledge of multilateralism which he made in Trinidad in April.

Meantime the new Honduran regime finds itself isolated. On Tuesday, the UN General Assembly unanimously condemned the coup and demanded Zelaya’s reinstatement, and the US has suspended a number of military and other arrangements with Honduras. At time of writing, it’s unclear whether the regime can withstand such international pressure. If it can’t, the likely scenario will involve the reinstatement of Zelaya, in return for his pledge to demit office for good when his term expires early next year.

Iraq:

Last week, as per the Bush-Maliki arrangement, endorsed by Obama, US forces withdrew to barracks from Iraq’s cities, leaving the latter to be policed by Iraq’s security forces. The widespread, Maliki-organized celebrations of Iraq’s newly-achieved ‘sovereignty’ were essentially phony, of course: US forces were not gone, just withdrawn to base, and the agreement gave Maliki the right to call on them as needed. Yet it was striking how heartfelt was the relief of the vast majority of Iraqis at the removal of the hated GIs from their lines of sight.

Iraq now enters a critical period. It’s long been believed in some quarters that the civil war that racked that country as recently as last year has not ended, just tacitly been put on hold. If it were to erupt in earnest again in the coming months, the central pledge of Obama’s presidential campaign, to disengage the US from Iraq, would quickly become inoperative. In fact, Obama tried to tamp down expectations, pointing to “difficult days ahead,” and on Monday, as if on cue, a suicide bomber in the northern city of Kirkuk killed 33 people, and four US soldiers were killed in Baghdad.

Iran:

Obama took a lot of flak during the campaign from Hillary Clinton and McCain for insisting he would engage with the Iranians, ending 30 years of (ineffectual) diplomatic isolation of the resurgent theocracy there. And for a few months after his inauguration, it seemed as though Iran might be in a mood to cooperate. That hope all but ended last month, however, when the Mullahs had to falsify the elections results to keep their chosen one, President Ahmadinejad, in power, and then had to unleash state violence to quell the widespread protests that erupted.

As though resigning themselves to the knowledge that they’d thereby burned their boats, Iranian authorities have since banned international journalists from reporting in the streets, and have also announced the prosecution of British embassy staffers for allegedly playing a part in orchestrating the post-election turmoil. The latter move enraged both Britain and the European Union, and the events of the past month clearly tie Obama’s negotiating hands.

Prior to last month, the President seemed willing to live with a nuclear (though not a nuclear-armed) Iran. But the US-Iran equation changed last month, and intransigence, and the violence that lurks behind intransigence, now seem much more likely.

Afghanistan:

Afghanistan (and Pakistan) are where, for the Obama administration’s foreign policy, the rubber meets the road, and last week Obama’s much heralded troop surge went into effect there. In the biggest US military operation since 2001, 4,000 newly arrived troops moved into villages in Taliban strongholds in Helmand province, on the same ‘Seize, hold and build’ programme that was said finally to have worked in Iraq.

Surprise: the anticipated clash never materialized; in classic guerrilla form, the Taliban simply melted away (not, however, before they managed to kill the highest-ranking British officer to have been killed in combat anywhere in 40 years. They also captured an American soldier elsewhere in the country; at time of writing, Special Ops forces were desperately looking for him).

It goes without saying, they’ll be back.

These are thus fateful months. The outcome of Obama’s big gamble in Afghanistan-Pakistan remains much too early to call. And it’s an outcome that, by itself, could make or break his presidency.