Chileno's Endorsement for President of the United States of America

The world - and Chile is no exception - has an intense interest in the outcome of the 2008 US Presidential Election. Not just the interest generated by crazed global media coverage, but rather a far greater material interest in the strength of each candidate's capacity for empathy.

Much is made of John McCain's time spent as a POW during the Vietnam War. Yet Chileno believes the time spent abroad by Barack Obama will prove to be far more instructive to the chief shaper and executor of US foreign policy.

This morning NPR reported how Obama's time in Indonesia coincided with the brutal Suharto dictatorship. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes how hundreds of thousands were killed or imprisoned by the US-backed regime. Newsweek editor Jon Meacham calls this "a very tactile experience of foreign policy." He continues:

Obama has been right in the thick of a messy, asymetrical, fluid situation in a country where power moves quickly and which can be a pawn in a larger game, in this case the Cold War.

When you look at how he wants to govern if he were to win, he is someone who I think is more conscious of what American power feels like on the receiving end, than on the giving end.

I think he understands the law of unintended consequences because he spent part of his childhood in a country in chaos in which America has played some role in creating or trying to capitalize on that chaos. I think you have more empathy with the people whose lives we are affecting. Not saying that you're sympathetic to them, let me be very clear, but I think you can imaginatively put yourself in the position of another country, of another region and how that region or that country may respond to overtures of American power.

Empathy suggests that you will be able to think a couple moves ahead of what the implications of an expression of American power would be and so i think the direct lesson of what Obama's written about in both Dreams of my Father and The Audacity of Hope is that what we do is often uncontrollable, when you unleash forces abroad it's very, very hard to manage them.

Emphasis added. Chile is no exception. The same CIA that backed the overthrow of Chile's democratically-elected Salvadore Allende later picked up intelligence on a 1976 assassination plot against a US Congressman by Pinochet's men - the very people the CIA backed!

Obama's opponent also had a very tactile experience with a pawn in the Cold War. And I don't mean Vietnam. Documents recently unearthed reveal a secret 1985 meeting between John McCain and Chile's ruthless dictator Augusto Pinochet, one arranged without preconditions and which followed several days of pallin' around with the Terrorist's cronies in Chile's verdant, sparkling south.

Tomás Dinges cites an AP report on torture in Chile that McCain should very well have been aware of at the time:

Since 1981 the US State Dept has recorded 286 cases of torture in Chile with the number increasing each year. Statistics kept by the Chilean Commission for Human Rights are more than three times higher.

Piercingly, Tomás writes, "McCain. How could you? What has changed in your judgment between then and now?"

Chileno wonders the same. In the final presidential debate, Obama lauded his rival's position against torture as "commendable." If only that commendable position could be relied upon. Chileno won't bite. McCain can't be trusted. He falls far short of Obama's capacity for empathy on the world stage. McCain is unworthy of the task of leading the United States of America and, by extension, much of the world.

Chileno endorses the living daylight outta Barack Obama.