Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Nudge

20 Friday Oct 2017

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I’m still only at the beginning of The Legends of Eisenwald, but there is a form of quest that has been repeated a number of times. The player is introduced to three competing factions and tasked with achieving unity between the three. At some point, the game suggests there are three possibilities.

  1. Convince two of them to join forces against the third;
  2. Choose one of them, and help that one defeat the other two; or
  3. Help one grow so powerful that the other two will set aside their difference to defeat him.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (link is probably paywalled) was titled How Obama Nudged Arab Leaders Toward Israel. In their write-up, the authors describe how Obama’s mishandling of the Arab Spring and the Iran nuclear weapons program caused Arab leaders (Egypt, Jordan, and  to form closer ties to Israel.

From the article:

From the perspective of Arab leaders, [the Obama] administration supported the wave of political Islamism that engulfed the region in the Arab Spring’s aftermath. It also threatened their regimes in unprecedented ways by abandoning Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak and slowing military exports to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain under the pretext of democratization. Worse, the administration signed a nuclear deal with Iran that reintegrated the ayatollahs’ regime into the international community while unleashing a wave of destabilization throughout the region.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got the cold shoulder from Obama. This allowed him to use Israeli’s traditional role as an American insider to protest and push back against the administration’s missteps. In turn, this made him a natural leader among the other Middle Eastern states that, just as Israel, were harmed by the Obama policies.

The authors do not frame their piece as a criticism of Obama. It seems more to inform the readers of how the Arab-Israeli peace process has moved forward, while perhaps unwittingly, probably permanently. Reading it, I assume it is a cloaked criticism of Obama, but I could be wrong. Indeed, perhaps the former President out-thought us all. Perhaps he chose option number 3.

But seriously, it hardly seems like a prudent move to destabilize a region in order to goad the powers of that region to work towards peace, even if it turns out that is what has been achieved. The Wall Street Journal piece does not attempt to analyze whether the advance in Arab-Israeli relations outweighs the negatives (as summarized in the above quote).

It begs the question. Does this suggest that sometimes the United States is better off doing nothing? For decades, the U.S. has brought Arab and Israeli adversaries to our table in attempt to force them into agreements. In doing so, were we helping to define their adversarial relationship? I have to wonder if there was any way to achieve the positives of Obama’s result without the negative consequences, or does it really take a crisis before people (both leaders and the rest of us) are willing to rethink their entrenched positions?

Dynasty

08 Friday Sep 2017

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Hillary: the Movie got added to my to-rent list during the 2016 presidential primary. A friend had posted on line asking what was wrong. For those who subsist purely on streaming video, the Citizens United film that made “Citizens United” everyone’s favorite epithet, the offering was no where to be found. Said friend speculated whether the controlling media entities, Netflix and Amazon, were doing it out of political bias. Myself, I suspect more mundane money issues involved. Nevertheless, I can’t stand being told what I can and cannot do, so I promptly queued up the DVD for rental.

It is now a good year-and-a-half beyond that most recent primary and almost a decade beyond when the film was originally made. So I’m a little late to the game. Hopefully, Hillary won’t be mounting another presidential run in 2020, but one never knows. As for the scandals  which are presented in the movie, I’ve read about several of them but several others were new to me. Of course, there was no time in the last 10 years when I considered myself a Hillary supporter. At the time, in the 2008 primary, I had stated I preferred Barack Obama as the Democrat’s nominee.

The movie itself is fairly well put together. There seems to be an effort to use documented information and to present opinions from the liberal side when possible. The more conspiratorial accusations against the Clintons are avoided in favor of incidents with public testimony or written evidence. A couple of the bits draw over heavily on emotions (e.g the focus on a dead soldier and his parents, where the point in question was Hillary’s inconsistent commitment to the War on Terror), but at least half the movie has a solid factual grounding.

Like I said, viewing the movie in a timely manner would never have swayed my vote (I now think Hillary would have made perhaps the worst possible president in U.S. history). As far a documentaries go, it was OK but not great. It was worth watching, however, to get some perspective on what the Citizen’s United v. FEC ruling was really all about.

It also makes me want to watch The Path to 9/11 (and ABC miniseries), but I can’t do that either. The Clintons had the DVD release blocked.

Snow White

26 Sunday Feb 2017

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Tonight’s movie, Snowden.

Snowden is Oliver Stone’s dramatization of the events already told in Laura Poitras’ Citizen 4. Unlike that film, we are not constrained the documentarian’s camera, and we can see Edward Snowden experiencing the formative events that lead him to take the actions he did. One interesting device Stone uses is to have (the portrayed) Poitras turn the camera off, so that Snowden can deliver dialog in the Hong Kong hotel which is absent from the actual documentary footage.

Stone visited Snowden in Russia and interviewed him extensively, so one can hope for veracity in the “dramatized” bits. In a nice touch (and I sincerely hope I’m not spoiling the ending with this!), actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt morphs into the actual Edward Snowden for the final scenes of the movie.

Olivers Stone’s politics are never far from the fore in any of his films. Sometimes that can ruin his movies, but in other cases his skill as an artist transcends his message to create something beyond what he ever intended (think “Greed is Good.”) Like so many of his characters, Snowden starts out an innocent patriot and, naively, a conservative before becoming disenchanted with George Bush and his policies. He initially hopes that Barack Obama will follow through on his campaign promises to reverse the trend (not a Stone thing, Snowden said it himself in Citizen 4), but becomes even more alarmed as the Obama government, if anything, is worse than before. One can assume that Stone’s disenchantment mirrors that of Snowden.

The film also includes footage from the presidential debates showing, in particular, that Hillary Clinton was unsympathetic to Snowden (although it is a bit difficult to cut through the doublespeak) likely implying that a Clinton presidency would continue on the same bad trajectory. A short clip of Donald Trump, using a bit of his characteristic bombast, criticizing Snowden is also included. The placement of it makes me wonder if it was thrown in just before release, when the possibility of a Trump presidency started to become remotely thinkable.

The only set of lines delivered in support of Edward Snowden during the political montage is uncredited on-screen but to savvy ears is clearly Bernie Sanders. One assumes this was Stone’s choice for the presidency (perhaps still a possibility during editing) and his last hope for both Snowden and, perhaps, the nation.

A few additional minor points in the story that got me thinking.

Snowden (the film) implies that the breaking point for Snowden (the man) was first the possibility, and then the knowledge, that people known to him in the government were observing his girlfriend’s private and intimate activities. I’m not aware that he has said as much explicitly. If you haven’t seen it, though, he speaks generally of the concept of how the government accessing your “dick picks” comes home to ordinary people much more than discussions of metadata in an interview with John Oliver.

The storytelling depicts several of Snowden’s co-workers, including a senior-level mentor, to be complicit in his actions. I don’t know how this jives with federal investigations and charges. If it doesn’t, I wonder if it reopened things?

Lastly, in close to the movies final scene (again, I hope I’m not spoiling anything), Snowden is shown to be deleting all his copies of the stolen data, leaving the several journalists with the only access to what he took. This is before he leaves Hong Kong for Russia. This would absolve Snowden of the accusations by the U.S. government that the information he stole, either intentionally or inadvertently, ended up in the hands of Putin’s security services once he entered Russia. If it was deleted, that simply would not be true. However, we have no way to verify that this is what happened, except for Oliver Stone’s belief in what he was told by Snowden himself.

Bottom line, I have to give this film my top rating on the subject matter alone. Unless you dismiss what is being shown as misdirecting propaganda, this may be one of the defining events of our generation.