The president’s most terrible power

To most of the people of the world, few lives or worlds could be as remote as those of the president of the United States. His is an impossible world, a place of such power and privilege that it is described in the language of myth. The story of Barack Obama’s entrance into that world, the ascendancy of a black man to such a pinnacle, is so potent that it is already more suited to study by semioticians than reporters or political analysts. A day into office, he is a symbol to the world quite apart what he represents to America at large or black America or any other group in this country. Yesterday, here in the Caribbean, I spoke to a a 25-year-old local man who said that he never paid any attention to politics anywhere, in his own country or in the United States “But Barack Obama,” he said, “he is a golden man.”

But there will very soon emerge a cautionary subtext in this tale of this son of a Kenyan. Hopes are pinned to him because he defied history and has now come to seemingly give a voice to vast seas of humanity whose primary relationship with real power in the world has been neglect or as collateral damage in grander schemes. But he is an American president, one man with limited hours in his day and limited resources at his disposal. When he chooses to intervene on behalf of the United States, his power can be immense. But the greatest power that he will exercise will be when he does nothing at all. Most of our headlines will focus on the places we act. But most of the dead who will accumulate in the world in the next four years from wars or disasters will be in the places we do little or nothing. And tragically, very often, these places will be among those most hopeful that Barack Obama will hear their pleas for assistance in ways that most of his predecessors have not. They will be in places like Kiwanja in Congo, where late last year over 150 people were brutally murdered by rebels while under-equipped, ill-led UN forces stood idly by less than a mile away. Over 5 million have died in that country’s civil war over the past decade, more than 6 times the worst estimates of deaths associated with the war in Iraq, more than a thousand times U.S. military losses in Iraq since that war began. Or places like Zimbabwe where what one can only hope are the final days of the reprehensible Robert Mugabe see the most complete failure of a failed state in modern history, a place where inflation now runs at eight quintillion percent and the country has just taken to issuing 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar notes (each worth eight dollars) and where half the country is at risk of a cholera epidemic the callous Mugabe denies. Now, the power-sharing talks with the opposition MDC have broken down and Mugabe’s henchmen have once again begun abductions and worse of opposition members. In Somalia, meanwhile, Ethiopian peacekeepeers have pulled out of Mogadishu leaving a security void which will undoubtedly have dark consequences.

Among the most grievous missteps of the Clinton Administration was the failure to act to stop the genocide in Rwanda. Among the most serious failures of humanity has been to fail to intervene in Congo or to stop the deaths of the more than 35 million who have died of AIDs in Africa. No doubt, Barack Obama enters office with every good intention of being more effective with regard to these issues but it is virtually certain that when he leaves office, his greatest regrets will be linked to those calamities he was forced to ignore, the vast majority of which are likely to come in the continent of his father’s birth.

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