Barack Hussein Obama rode on the back of the antiwar movement into presidential history. If there were no toppling of Saddam Hussein by US led forces there would be no President B. Hussein Obama. The man with the middle name “Hussein” opposed the forceful ousting of Saddam by Bush naively believing that we could have been stopped, tamed and contained him-a completely mistaken notion as Saddam's global terrorist activities were uncontainable and dangerously growing. But is it happenstance, I wonder, that Obama shares the same name as the ill starred dictator? The Arab name "Hussein?" Is Obama's middle name a dire warning to himself and America about his dismal fate if he goes too far in his transformational ambitions to Europeanize, collectivize and socialize capitalist America?
When comparing both men I notice that Obama shares with Saddam two very troubling traits: ideological intransigence and recklessness. Could it be that like Saddam no disaster is too big or catastrophe too great to wake up Obama and bring him to his senses? Could it be that nothing but his tragic downfall will stop him? Is his mind hopelessly blinded by his radical beliefs ? Is he helplessly lost to his destructive llusions? I believe so.
Take Saddam's monumental recklessness: the Iran-Iraq War and a million dead; the Gulf War and his army in ruins; bombings, embargoes, sanctions killing scores of Iraqi children and civilians; George W. Bush with the gun of U.S. power to his head; suffering all these blows and faced with worse Saddam never relented or repented, never gave way to despair or defeat, never doubted his mission and destiny, never disbelieved in the rightness of his cause: the cause of Pan-Arab Nationalism, the cause of becoming king and savior of the once proud and mighty Arab race-saving them from powerlessness, humiliation and the Zionist scourge. A U.S. led invasion to depose him, no problem! Saddam would go underground, lead a Sunni insurgency and driving out the infidel invaders-causing them a second Vietnam-fulfill his heroic destiny of becoming master of the Arab world. It was all so certain, all so clear: “Shock and Awe” was his royal road to victory and immortality. Saddam was intransigence incarnate; nothing on earth could stop him from pursuing his evil dreams until he was cornered like a rat climbing out of a hole and ended his days at the end of a rope.
Indeed, the B. Hussein Obama who once arrogantly told a female reporter that “I never doubt myself” has Saddam's ideological intransigence; he is as fanatically bent-short of murdering his foes-to impose his ruinous programs on America as was Saddam in his plans to conquer Arabia and socialize it under his brutal rule. Fueled by a passion for social justice and the utopian imbecilities of the welfare state, driven by a desire to weaken and humble America and make it loved by an envious world, Obama is intent on exceeding the failures and follies of the past: exceeding the disaster of the failed New Deal and the folly and catastrophe of the War on Poverty. And when his mistaken efforts to fix the economy fail Obama will pick himself up and try failure again with greater zeal, more spending, taxes and power grabs.
Obama is all sail and no anchor; borne aloft so he believes by “righteous winds” of change and destiny, only his removal from power will stop him as it stopped Saddam. Am I speaking of insurrection? of counter-revolution? of blood in the streets? an American Thermidor? God forbid it should come to that! We’re a civilized people, a nation of ballots not bombs, angry not violent peacefully electing and deposing our leaders-and that is how it should be. But I fear that this man, this calm determined unbending lunatic who thirsts for socialist glory and radical change, is willing to go for broke; I fear that he is willing to cast caution and law aside and become the American Salvador Allende defiantly implementing socialism by any means and throwing society into turmoil and war. If so, if B. Hussein Obama is that unyielding, intransigent and ideologically insane hell bent, whatever the cost, on saving America from democratic capitalism, then he could meet the tragic fate of Salvador Allende or that of the crazed, wicked, reckless Saddam (see notes 1, 2 and 3)*.
*I do not perceive any violence or taste for bloodshed in Obama and here is where he differs from Saddam. But the democratically elected Salvador Allende, a physician by profession, started out, like Obama, on the path of bloodless revolution but ended defending his cause on the barricades with a gun. Obama lives for the socialist ideal, the question is whether he is willing to die for it.
Notes
1.Those who see a “new LBJ” in Barack Obama will be interested to learn that Salvador Allende was born in 1908 and died in 1973 the same years Lyndon Johnson was born and died.
2. Salvador (the savior) Allende, like messiah Obama is doing now, rushed his revolutionary program to socialize Chile's economy trying to do too much too quickly: nationalizing the banking and copper industries, getting control of the health care and educational systems and redistributing income and property to Chile's poor on a massive scale. Obama is very much an echo of the hasty, rash, precipitous Marxist Allende. Allende exacerbated an already divided and polarized country and his programs made a shambles of Chile's economy causing soaring inflation, deficits and negative GDP growth. There is perhaps no better analogy to Barack Obama's messianic socialism than the mad, impatient, ruthless progressivism of Salvador Allende.
3. Just as Obama is the third U.S. President to come directly from the Senate, the other two being Harding and Kennedy (who didn't complete their terms), so was Salvador Allende a senator turned President-and like Harding and Kennedy he didn't complete his term.