Democrats’ defeat in the November 2 congressional elections is raising
uncertainties around the issue of resetting US foreign policies and peculations whether or not Obama will be re-elected in 2012.
David Broder, columnist with The Washington Post, says that a resurgent economy would obviously help lift the President’s approval numbers, and that what would really help the economy surge may be an armed confrontation with Iran.
“Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II. Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve,” he wrote.
“I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history,” Broder said.
In his book The Fall of America, Elijah Muhammad wrote that “the strong-hold of the American Government is falling to pieces. She has lost her prestige among the nations of the earth. One of the greatest powers of America was her dollar. The loss of such power will bring any nation to weakness, for this is the media of exchange between nations. The English pound and the American dollar have been the power and beckoning light of these two great powers… But when the world went off the gold and silver standard, the financial doom of England and America was sealed.”
Nowadays more and more countries are looking for a new substitute for the American dollar, for the new reserve currency. This is a real challenge for the existing world financial order. Will the U.S. really be able to start a new war for the sake of their economy?
Patrick J. Buchanan argued in his article, Does Obama need a war, that a war is really not an option.
“First, how exactly are ‘preparations for war’ on Iran going to improve our economy when two actual wars costing $1 trillion have left us in the deepest recession since the 1930s? If war is good for the economy, why is this nation, at war for a decade, growing at 2 percent, while China, which invests in rogue regimes rather than bombs them, is booming? Moreover, any attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be carried out by air and missile strikes from ships and planes already in the U.S. arsenal. We would not need the tens of thousands of ships, tanks, guns, and planes we needed in WWII, or the 12 million men under arms,” he wrote.
“Israel calls Iran ‘an existential threat.’ But Israel has 200 nukes and the planes, subs and missiles to deliver them, while U.N. inspectors claim Iran has not diverted any of its low-enriched uranium for conversion to weapons grade. Should it do so, say U.S. officials, we would have a year’s notice before Iran could even test a device, let alone build a bomb. We are told Ahmadinejad is a madman, a religious fanatic, a Hitler who would die happy, even if Iran were incinerated, if only he could explode a nuclear bomb on Israel or the United States… If Obama prepares for war and Iran refuses to back down, how many U.S. dead and wounded would Broder consider a fair price to pay for a second term for his “enduringly superior” leader?”