OBAMA On Foreign Policy

With the gruelling 21 month US election campaign over (gruelling for us as well as the candidates), Barak Obama, the history making African American has been elected as the first black president in history as expected by bookies, pollsters and as hoped for by a lot of people outside of the US. What will his election mean to the world?

Obama comes from an African American generation that witnessed Dr Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and a host of other domestic civil rights leaders. The son of a Kenyan father and American mother, Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.

After his parents’ divorce, his mother remarried and he lived in Indonesia for several years.

He later obtained his degree in New York and spent several years working for church groups assisting the poor in Chicago in the mid western state of Illinois.

Obama eventually, like several other presidential candidates, entered the legal profession, becoming the first African-American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review while obtaining his law degree.

He then returned to Chicago, teaching and working as a civil rights lawyer before entering the Illinois state senate in 1997.

Firstly, those in most immediate need of respite from the US and its Empire building military machine, Iraqis, aren’t holding their breath for a let up in what many Iraqis now consider an occupation.

“We don’t expect any change to happen overnight or any hasty change in U.S. policy and commitment toward Iraq,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told Al-Arabiyah TV moments after Obama claimed victory over Republican John McCain.

But he acknowledged that Obama “will not have the same enthusiasm and momentum for this situation” in Iraq as Bush.

Obama’s foreign policy on Israel has comforted many nervous Israeli’s as his Muslim background send shivers up spines in Jerusalem, but he calmed all jitters by telling APAIC, a highly influential group of pro Israel lobby group that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel.

As for Northern Ireland, Obama has appointed a special envoy to continue to solidify peace efforts there, but is viewed as being likely to take more of a back seat to local politicians than his predecessor.

Obama has also indicated that he may open negotiations with leaders of countries that are through to be hostile with America, the likes of Iran and Cuba.

One thing is for sure, if he wants to win hearts and minds in Latin America, he will have to do some pretty fancy footwork, especially where Hugo Chavez is concerned.

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