From dreams to drones who is the real obama

Take the debate on Native rights in Valladolid, Spain. Still, Las Casas viewed American natives as inferior to Spaniards:. They are most obedient and faithful to their natural lords and to the Christians whom they serve. They are most submissive, patient, peaceful and virtuous. Nor are they quarrelsome, rancorous, querulous, or vengeful.

Moreover they are more delicate than princes and die easily from work or illness. They neither possess nor desire to possess worldly wealth. But this was a misreading. Like Obama, Rice was always attuned to the limits of the possible; I recall an off-the-record briefing in the late spring or summer of at which she explained—sincerely, I thought—why military action was far less likely to succeed in Syria than it had in Libya.

Syria was a more agonizing and more intensely personal issue for Power. That was the argument she lost over Armenia. Rice and Power leave the reader with slightly different impressions of this extraordinary figure, at once intimate and remote. Obama ultimately extricated himself from the dilemma when Russia offered to help rid Syria of chemical weapons. Rice concludes that she was wrong and Obama right, since the threat was she claims eliminated without the use of force.

For Power, the achievement of a U. If each author is the hero of her own story, above each, shaping their destiny from the clouds, is the figure of Obama. They leave the reader with slightly different impressions of this extraordinary figure, at once intimate and remote.

He is far more attuned to remote consequences of action than the idealists are but far more aware than are the realists of the power of words and even small deeds to shape a different world. Foreign policy is a tragic enterprise, a matter of choosing the lesser among evils. There is no mistaking the pathos of that acceptance. But what else is one to do? Foreign Policy. Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort. Susan Rice, former U. Tags: Barack Obama , U. Or are they? The Month in World Photos. Analysis Richard Aboulafia. Argument Andrew Connelly. November 11, , PM. Blame Brussels. But to get to where he wanted In an incorrigibly rightwing political culture, this obliged Obama to always appear tougher than his white opponents.

During his presidential debates with John McCain, Obama often startled many of us with his threats to expand the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan. More disquietingly, he claimed the imprimatur of Henry Kissinger, who partnered Richard Nixon in the ravaging of Cambodia, paving the way for Pol Pot, while still devastating Vietnam. It is also true that drone warfare manifests the same pathologies - racial contempt, paranoia, blind faith in technology and the superstition of body counts - that undermined the US in Vietnam.

The White House has been used before to plot daily mayhem in some obscure, under-reported corner of the world.

A weak Pakistan, its rulers bribed and bullied into acquiescence, is the easier setting for a display of American firepower. But he refuses to apologise for the American air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November last year. And now another man sits in the White House, surveying his own kill lists and plotting re-election, after having already pulled off the cruellest political hoax of our times. From dreams to drones — who is the real Obama?

From the Newspaper Published June 5, Facebook Count.