Now do the same with health care

The anti-imperialist cant from lamentable figures like Chávez and Gaddafy contains enough grains of truth that it’s a real pity they turn themselves into the most public vehicles of what are indeed cogent criticisms. When a goofball like Gaddafy is the one to take the podium at the UN and remind the world of the grotesque illegality of the invasion of Iraq, his antics obscure what should be an uncomfortable truth.

So instead of defensiveness over a criminal war of conquest, the U.S. gets to take Ahmadinejad behind the barn for a spanking over Iran’s secret uranium processing plant. Obama set the stage by shepherding a resolution through the Security Council on nuclear disarmament, undercutting Iran’s (true) argument that it was the nuclear monopolists like the United States who allowed the weapons to spread to favored allies (Israel, Pakistan).

But instead, the world is now focused on Iran’s increasingly unbalanced demagogue who just regaled the airwaves with vile, anti-Semitic claptrap close on the heels of his hugely discrediting electoral debacle of the summer. After Bush had to drag the European allies along kicking and screaming, Obama now has them all lined up behind him (quite literally) to demand concessions from Iran on the nuclear issue and ready jointly to wield effective economic weapons to enforce their wishes.

Obama also dumped a useless and provocative missile program in Central Europe to get the Russians on board, with considerable success by all appearances.

Obama is ten times better at projecting U.S. power and influence than Bush and the neocons could dream of in their adolescent, tough-guy fantasy world. He addressed Muslims and the Iranians specifically in the most respectful terms in his speech from Egypt, called for talks without preconditions and generally looked reasonable in stark contrast with Bush’s wild-eyed, apocalyptic pronouncements about the ‘Axis of Evil’. He stayed mostly out of the Iranian election scandal until it became a world-class embarrassment.

And he has been unexpectedly harsh with Netan-Yahoo and the Israeli bullies, weakening another favorite Iranian argument. Simultaneously and almost unnoticed (certainly by the U.S. media), the International Atomic Energy Agency just slapped Israel with a fairly unprecedented resolution of ‘concern’ about its 200 nuclear warheads. Iran proposed the resolution, and the U.S. voted no, but it seems to me that even-handedness from these multilateral bodies strengthens the U.S. position rather than weakens it.

In short, Obama may succeed where all the chest-bumps from the missile-wavers and their armchair militarists (like David Brooks) failed miserably.

Let’s hope his steady and sane approach produces similar results at home.