President Obama, Great Statesman, Pulls off Two Diplomatic Feats; Syria and Iran

President Obama is such a great statesman and world leader, with an unerring instinct for diplomacy. First he managed, without firing a shot, to get Assad and Putin to the negotiating table, and to prompt a UN Security Council resolution to coerce Assad to give up all his chemical weapons. 

The resolution was passed on Thursday, having been put together by the five permanent members of the Security Council; the US, Britain, France, Russia and China. The ten non-permanent members (Australia, Azerbaidjan, Argentine, South Korea, Morocco, Luxemborg, Togo, Rwanda, Guatamela and Pakistan) signed on Friday. Action to investigate Assad’s arsenal of chemical weapons begins on Tuesday. The deal was put together in a couple of weeks, pointing to how desperate everybody was for some kind of solution to Assad’s use of sarin gas; Russia and China included. Putin certainly didn’t know how to back down from his obdurate position, caught between a rock and hard place. 

But no leaders had the gutzpah to step out, especially in the face of Putin’s continued veto and western voters’ apathy about Syrians being slaughtered by Assad’s regime and the threat of chemical weapons usage becoming an accepted norm. 

No leader that is, except for Barack Obama. For him, what Assad did wasn’t acceptable. So he acted, despite massive resistance at home and no support from the international community. What a great man. He didn’t just act, he acted brilliantly and succeeded. International coup – as in triumph, feat, accomplishment, achievement, scoop, master stroke, stroke of genius – number one.

Then yesterday he made a phone call to President Rouhani who was on his way to the airport. Rouhani had refused a meeting with Obama and the opportunity to shake hands. But Obama called him anyway. And Rouhani took the call. For the first time in thirty-four years the US and Iranian leaders spoke, both against the will of hardliners at home. It gave Rouhani what he needed to take back to his electorate who voted him in because he’s a moderate and they want an end to sanctions and bad relations with the US. 

Obama pulled off a second international coup. And let's not forget that he did it whilst also dealing with his own hardliners at home, a disintegrating Congress and the threat of a government shutdown. 

He doesn’t have as much support as he deserves at home. He deserves to be celebrated and lauded. The saddest and most aggravating aspect of his term in office is that prejudices that have nothing to do with politics still run deep in the US and prevent too many from seeing the reality of who he is and what he’s achieving. 

But some see it. And history will judge him as one of the greatest ever US presidents and world leaders. Because that’s what he is.

Iceland’s Minister Jonassen Acts to Stop Internet Porn

It’s a world where everybody is constantly clamoring for freedom to act out your own destiny without anybody placing unnatural limits on your right to speak and work and live, where the words regulation and censorship are like red rags to everybody’s bull. But now Iceland’s Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson has spoken out against internet porn and introduced the idea that it should be banned because of the effect it has on children, who can access it too easily.

He has appointed committees to study ways to prevent children from seeing these images on games consoles, smartphones and computers. One of the options would be to block the IP addresses of known porn sites and make it illegal to pay for online porn with an Iceland-based credit card. 

If Iceland goes through with this it will be the first Western democracy to block online pornography. Right now it is already illegal to print and distribute porn, and strip clubs were banned two years ago because of how they violate the rights of women who work in them.

Of course, Jonasson has drawn fire, from advocates of freedom of the Web, in particular, a member of Iceland’s parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir. In an editorial in The Guardian (UK) she called the proposed bill “bizarre”, saying it is impossible to erect walls around the internet unless you create an entirely independent internet as Iran is attempting to do. The Iran-fear factor; there’s nothing like it for striking terror into the hearts of people.

Jonsdottir also wrote about the danger of companies not wanting to host their businesses in Iceland as they fear this bill will presage the kind of blanket censorship that China and Saudi Arabia practice. Ah, the China-fear factor. Jonsdottir didn’t address how such a simple, well-defined and isolated instance of censorship could ever snowball into the kind of manic destruction of rights that she suggests we will all have to guard against.

Personally, I think the loss of some paranoid businesses – if they even exist, Jonsdottir didn’t elaborate; fear mongers never do – is a small price to pay for a move that the world should have taken a long time ago, and that would place Iceland amongst the heroes. The internet’s porn trade is the Wild West; unfettered freedom, a breeding ground for criminals and rank exploiters. And children use this medium the most. I think every single thing that can be done should be done.

Jonsdottir has suggested the development of free anti-porn software and educating parents. There’s nothing wrong with her ideas, and she should move on them. The more solutions in the pot the better. But ‘education’ is always the panacea that’s offered when people want to avoid the hard solution because money is involved. The NRA and Republicans in the US tout education instead of gun control. 

On its own, education won’t fix a problem, because you can’t force parents who don’t really give a damn to participate. You can’t force people to read pamphlets or attend lectures either – it’s their basic human right to choose. And in any case one lecture or a series doesn’t always inspire people to act in a sustainable way. This isn't just about people not understanding the dangers, it's about a culture of adult apathy.

It’s kind of like having advanced cancer; you can decide to learn about what has caused it and how you need to change your life, but you’d better also do something about those rampant cancer cells right now. Internet porn is a cancer and it’s rampant, and the way it affects children is as serious a problem in the world as global warming. Lawmakers need to take it seriously. I think Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson is heading for a Nobel Prize.