July 25, 2008--Obama's Walls

I was planning to write something about Iraq. About the current wonky debate about the “surge.” Who was for it (McCain); who was against it (Obama); whether or not it fueled or followed the so-called “Anbar Awakening—where Sunni leaders joined together to get after al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (sort of both); and if McCain had the foresight to urge this unpopular policy and it has contributed to some increased stability in Iraq, shouldn’t he get credit for that from even folks such as me who support Obama?

I was going to tip my hat to McCain; but following that I was thinking about making the further point that these improvements on the ground in Iraq, partly the result of McCain’s leadership, are now ironically playing right into Obama’s hand—how his plan to extract troops from Iraq over 16 months and deploy more of them to Afghanistan where they are sorely needed reflects his ability to see things in global perspective and lends credibility to Iraq’s prime minister Maliki essentially endorsing the Obama plan, which in turn enhances Obama’s foreign-policy-Commander-in-Chief chops.

(See linked NY Times article that makes these points much better than I would have if I had chosen to write about this.)

But my own blog plans lurched off track yesterday afternoon as I watched and listened to Obama’s speech in Berlin. Prior to it there was carping that it was presumptuous for him, for someone not yet even a nominee to speak there at a public event, perhaps attempting not-so-subliminally to wrap himself in the lingering glow of JFK’s stirring Ich bein ein Berliner and Reagan’s memorable Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall speeches.

And though those complaints will continue as some will relentlessly attack him as calculating and elitist and effetely Eurocentric, and much worse, if you can put those concerns aside if you have them, if you weren’t able to witness the speech directly, I urge you to check the video of it on Barack Obama’s Website because it is perhaps the best political speech on 21st century geopolitics that we’ve yet had.

His ability to view and understand the implications, challenges, and opportunities that result from the interconnectivity of seemingly disparate events and movements is remarkable. And to think, he actually wrote the speech himself.

Here are a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite for more:

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all. . . .

That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

We know they have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a Union of promise and prosperity. Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace. Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle of a courageous people defeated apartheid.

So history reminds us that walls can be torn down.