Well from a global
perspective I don't think that there's much to choose between him and
Bush. I mean President Obama has expanded the war into the sovereign
territory of Pakistan and Pakistan is now being torn apart, you know?
So you have Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, now they've --
two days ago they started talking about "a game changer" in Syria
because they don't know who's using chemical weapons -- though they
probably supplied it to both sides. So you have -- you have a situation
where it looks like it's a psychosis which is -- You know, look at --
look at what's going on with Tony Blair says that it was one of the
better decisions he made in his life and now he's getting paid $500,000 a
lecture to go and talk about morality and ethical behavior and God, and
so on, you know? Bush is painting self-portraits of himself in the
shower and [former US Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld is
congratulating people who participated in the war -- after killing
134,000 people and the sanctions were more than a million. So what are
American citizens to do? I think, well, perhaps it's a good question
for all of us because all of us seemed to be strapped into some kind of
straight jacket and the idea is that, "Are you going to again go out and
vote for a Democrat or Republican or Democrats and Republicans when we
know that this is what is going on?" So until, in some way, we are able
to at least -- at least not participate so enthusiastically in what
these governments are doing with us. It is the same thing in India,
though people don't actually participate so enthusiastically. I mean in
India the current government has actually 10% of the population voted
for it in this great majority that it claims it has. And I think more
people vote for the American Idol than vote for the American president.
But the problem is that we are faced with a crisis in our idea of
democracy because governments who claim to represent us, do not. I
mean, before the Iraq War, millions of people marched against it. None
of the governments in any way cared about what people really wanted.
So, to answer your question, I think the danger of somebody like Obama
is that he smokes up the mirrors and a lot of the opposition just thinks
"Oh, he's better than Bush!" and so then it divides the opposition --
whereas he's actually doing things in terms of foreign policy which are
sometimes worse than Bush.
-- author and activist Arundahti Roy speaking to Ruth Conniff on last week's Progressive Radio.