Here is Archbishop Desmond Tutu boldly advising President Obama in an article written for the BBC:

In the first days after 9/11, the United States had the world’s sympathy, an unprecedented wave of it. President Bush squandered it.

Obama too could easily squander the goodwill that his election generated if he disappoints.

It would be wonderful if, on behalf of the nation, Obama apologises to the world, and especially the Iraqis, for an invasion that I believe has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.  

While he’s already promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay, he should also move to ratify the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court.

When we were at school we had a chemistry experiment aimed at establishing the thickness of a molecule of oil by placing a blob of oil on water covered in lycopodium powder then doing something with the world-famous Avodagro Number. It turned out that a molecule of oil was not very thick at all.

I recall all this because that micro-depth corresponds almost exactly with the depth of analysis in the Archbishop’s article.

This man is meant to be a Christian thinker of some consequence. So why does he not think?

He characterises the invasion of Iraq as an unmitigated disaster. How does he view the quality of the nascent democratic processes now unfolding there? Really so worthless and without consequence for the mass of Iraqis who now have  democratic prospects comparable to (and maybe even exceeding) those of than South Africans under the ANC?

He bewails the horrific images from Abu Graib, as if a small number of such abuses defines and negates the whole project – not a view I recall him taking towards acts of ANC-sponsored terrorism aimed at ending the absence of democracy in South Africa.

So should Obama ‘apologise’ for the fact that the USA has sacrificed a lot of lives and wealth to help Iraqis have the sort of freedoms which South Africans now have? No, of course not. Even if he is minded to do so, he probably has a closer eye on avoiding ‘disappointing’ US voters than sucking up to far-flung clerics.

Tutu frets at the Bush Administration’s decisions not to sign the Kyoto Protocol or the International Criminal Court Statute. Yet on Kyoto did not President Bush follow President Clinton’s prudent example?

And when the American neo-cons warned that the ICC would turn out to a politicised farce, were they not right? Lo and behold, Africa’s leaders (South Africa not exactly holding back) are flatly opposed to the looming ICC indictment of the ghastly President of Sudan and are whirring away to make Africa a zone free of universal jurisdiction.

The Archbishop reasonably claims that

… an upright US was a great inspiration in our fight against the iniquity of apartheid. I pray that President Obama will come down hard on African dictators, especially because they cannot credibly charge him with being neo-colonialist.

No doubt they will charge him with that incredibly instead.

1/10. Very disappointing. Try much harder next time.