Obama's Fate

Barack Obama (Photo credit: jamesomalley)

It's no surprise that Barack Obama's authoritarian streak is revealing itself at last. It was always there; clearly apparent in his rhetoric (e.g., his envy of Chinese president Xi Jin-ping's powers), his abuse of executive orders, his threats against Congress, his sultan with fly-whisk attitudes toward his opposition, and even his vacations, which reek more of third-world trash gamboling on the Riviera than any American leader (George W. Bush settled his mind by clearing brush in Texas, Reagan at his ranch in Santa Barbara. Obama unfortunately finds the brush already cleared in Martha's Vineyard and Hawaii.) The sole question that remains is how anyone can deny it.

Obama comes by his attitude toward government honestly enough. Just before the 2012 election I published a piece here at AT analyzing Obama's political background. He spent most of his formative years in Indonesia, exposed almost exclusively to the influences of Indonesian culture -- Islam, mass public corruption, and a political system based on two-fisted authoritarianism. Obama's political heritage is rooted in the postwar Islamic strongman role pioneered by Gamel Abdul Nasser, the leader of Egypt from 1953 to 1970, and then refined by numerous other such figures, including Achmed Sukarno and Mohammed Suharto  of Indonesia.

Sukarno was a colorful leader who controlled a populist coalition of the military, the peasants, and the intelligentsia (among them a powerful communist party), through a three-ring political circus in which the main attraction was Sukarno's never-ending one-man battle against the West. After nearly two decades of this, the country was in serious danger of going into the dumpster -- Sukarno had pulled Indonesia out of the UN and was kissing up to the Chinese, in the process turning ever larger sections of government over to the local communists. This lost him the military, always a mistake for a third-world strongman, and in 1965 things came to a head with a bungled coup (planned by whom? -- something that remains uncertain to this day) in which a number of military officers were murdered. The army struck back, and after a confused interlude featuring massacres across the country, the communists were out (most of them -- estimates range up to half a million -- dead), Sukarno was under house arrest, and General Suharto had ended up as maximum leader.

Suharto ran the country as his personal fiefdom for the next thirty-odd years. At the end of that period he had distinguished himself as possibly the most corrupt ruler in history, with a fortune of thirty billion plus stashed in various foreign banks. His avaricious family, which controlled most of the county's industry, pocketed at least as much. Under Suharto's control, Indonesia became notorious for its atrocities in West Irian and East Timor, at the same time meandering its way to a vague prosperity that in no way matched nearby Singapore and Malaysia. (To give Suharto due credit, he did not allow dogs to eat off the china.)

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