gairrhydd | POLITICS@GAIRRHYDD.COM MONDAY FEBRUARY 01 2010
A year in the life of Barack Obama As Barack Obama celebrates a year as the most powerful man on Earth, Sohaib Khan ponders whether it's really been a success
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n the recent election in Massachusetts the Democrats lost a Senate seat they had held for more than half a century. This was by no means a welcome present on the first anniversary of the Obama Administration. Republican Scott Brown defeated Democratic candidate Martha Coakley by a five percent margin to win a seat previously occupied by the late Ted Kennedy. Mr Brown’s victory serves as an alarm bell for both Democrats and President Obama, with mid-term elections approaching. Mr Brown’s election has also deprived the Democrats of their filibuster-proof supermajority in the senate, sending the Healthcare Reform Bill into peril. To convert the healthcare reform bill into a law, Democrats need 60 votes. They now have 59. Republicans, vehemently opposed to the legislation, can employ delaying tactics and send to ruins one of Obama’s key campaign promises. The Republican win screams out the ever declining support for Democrats since Obama took office. From an approval rating of 70% in February last year to a little over 50% at the moment, Obama is clearly struggling in the polls. But the anger of Massachusetts’s voters and frustration of American in general was not totally unexpected. Thanks to the Bush Administration’s hopeless two terms and the “hopeful” promises of Obama, his presidential campaign skyrocketed American’s expectations. Certainly 12 months is not enough to
“right the wrongs” of the previous eight years. Even more so when the current White House inherited the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, two wars and extra-ordinary foreign policy challenges in the Middle East.
Americans doubt Obama's effect on their day-to-day lives Whilst Obama has done most of what he promised on Economic Recovery and Health Care, he has yet to accomplish anything on foreign policy. When Obama took office, half a million Americans had lost jobs, home foreclosures across the United States were on the rise and the future of the banking system was in doubt. The Obama administration, with its initial $787 billion dollar stimulus package, rescued failing mortgage lenders and pumped money into financial institutions for economic stabilization. Experts say that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has saved hundreds of businesses from bankruptcy, saved millions of jobs and slowed down home foreclosures. But Republicans have criticized the Administration for its massive spending. The United States Federal deficit is projected at $1.35 trillion this year and this has alarmed voters. Although the Economic Recovery programs did save the US
economy from free fall, this has yet to translate into jobs for ordinary Americans. Current unemployment rates hover at 10% and voters are worried that the stimulus package rescued Wall Street but not created jobs for those out of w ork. Republicans are capitalizing on the huge pile of public
OBAMA: A good year?
debt and the unemployment rate to steer voters against the White House. Successive US presidents have tried to reform the health sector in the US. In the US there is no universal health coverage. Barack Obama made healthcare reform one of his top policy priorities and if the law is passed it could provide health insurance to more than 30 million Americans. However, the program does have its critics, who say reform is expensive and increases the role of big government. Charming on the surface, Obama’s approach to foreign policy has been pragmatic but he has yet to deliver any meaningful results. Although Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay two days after taking office, there remain a couple of hundred prisoners at Camp Delta. In June 2009, Obama delivered a much-anticipated speech in Cairo in an attempt to improve the United States’ standing in the Muslim world. He reaffirmed his belief in the “unbreakable” alliance between the US and Israel but at the same time called for a halt to
further Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The intensified bilateral talks between George Mitchell (US Special Envoy to the Middle East) and the Israeli authorities put pressure on the Israeli Prime Minister as he announced a 10-month freeze on settlements. In December last year, Obama announced he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to intensify the war against Al-Qaida and the Taliban. At the same time, he indicated an exit strategy for US troops by 2011 when Afghan forces would be able to take control and maintain security. If Obama’s policies in Afghanistan result in a political settlement and American troops are pulled out he could secure significant number of votes in the next elections.
The Republicans are on the rebound and Obama faces many challenges After a year in office Obama is under a mountain of challenges. Republicans are on the rebound as Scott Brown’s victory has shown. Meanwhile, the White House is struggling with health care reform, job creation and problems in the Af-Pak region. 12 months might be a pre mature time to judge Obama but his policies, domestic and foreign, have shown more of the realist Obama than the idealist presidential candidate he once was.
Afghanistan? That's so 2009...
Yemen has been forced onto the agenda by a man with a bomb in his pants. David Rogers tells us why we should pay attention
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ecently featured in the press for its alleged terrorist training camps, Yemen is also a strategically vital country for other western interests in the Middle East. to its position in the Gulf of Aden and its border with Saudi Arabia, the impoverished Islamic state is ideally situated to control access to the Red Sea, and therefore the Suez canal to the north, much like nearby war-torn Somalia. As reports continue to focus on terrorism in the region, America may be in a position to manufacture the consent it needs to step up its involvement there. Yemen has so far mostly been reported only in the context of Islamic student Umar Farouk Mutallab’s attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner and his radicalisation there during a visit to the country in 2004. However, recent evidence has surfaced that shows that the US has been
fighting a covert war inside Yemen for at least the last year. US sources at the time indicate a withholding of information, including a governmentfunded Congressional Service Report in July 2009 which claimed there was a ‘lack of interest in Yemen with in the broader foreign policy community’. But the then-classified US involvement before and after the claim was made contradicts this assertion. American operations also intensified, becoming public, albeit underreported, knowledge immediately before the bombings took place. On December 18, a week before the bombing, Nobel Peace Prize-winner President Obama ordered cruise missile strikes in Yemen following a week of attacks, according to ABC News. This happened a day before the US State Department issued a strenuous denial of strikes reported to be carried out by American fighter jets that killed 120 people, claiming ‘We do not have
a military role in this conflict’. The conflict to which the State Department representative J. P. Crowley was referring to in was the Saudi campaign against Yemeni-based Houthi rebels, which had also increased in violence that week. Saudi Arabia, as a client state to the US, is also usefully placed to act as a proxy for Americanfunded operations in the area. The
SANA'A: Capital city of Yemen
reported objectives of the operations are the stamping out of terrorism, but the strikes can also be interpreted as attempting to protect the important oil trading routes through the Red Sea, which is a joint concern of both nations as well as the Saudis. Over the last few weeks there has been speculation as to whether Yemen might become ‘The next Afghani-
stan’, although considering how overstretched the US Armed Forces are, analysts argue that it is unlikely that the US has the resources for a conventional, full scale deployment. Despite this, the American government has now earmarked 50 million dollars in aid to Yemen during 2010, as well as Pentagon spending of 70 million on strategic operations, according to The Australian. The attempted airline attacks during Christmas might be enough for the US government to justify spending yet more taxpayer dollars in the Middle East, on a country which most Americans, thanks to their underfunded education system, are unlikely to even be able to find on a map. Considering America’s beleaguered economy, 120 million dollars of government spending on Yemen indicates that the US has a serious interest in escalating its operations in the Persian Gulf.