Exclusive interview with Presıdent Obama

Rick Warren: The Bible says that integrity and love are the basis of leadership. Looking back, what would be the greatest moral failure in your life? And what would the greatest moral failure of the United States?

Barack Obama: Well, in my own life, I’d break it up in stages. I had a difficult youth. My father wasn’t in the house. There were times when I experimented with drugs. I drank in my teenage years. And what I trace this to is a certain selfishness on my part. I was so obsessed with me, and the reasons that I might be dissatisfied, that I couldn’t focus on other people. When I find myself taking the wrong step, I think a lot of the time it’s because I’m trying to protect myself, instead of trying to do God’s work. And so that, I think, is my own failure.

Warren: What about the United States?

Obama: I think the country’s greatest moral failure in my lifetime has been that we still don’t abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me. There is a pervasive sense that this country, as wealthy and powerful as we are, still doesn’t spend enough time thinking about the least of these.

Warren: Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?

Obama: Evil does exist. I mean, I think we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children. And it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely. One of the things that I strongly believe is that we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it.

The one thing that is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, because a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.

Warren: In the name of good?

Obama: In the name of good. And I think one thing that’s very important is having some humility and recognising that just because we think our intentions are good does not always mean that we’re going to be doing good.

Warren: I want us to talk about America’s responsibility to the rest of the world. We are the most blessed nation in the world, and we’re blessed to be a blessing. To whom much is given, much is required. So let’s just go down some of those issues – international issues. First thing, let’s talk about war. As a US citizen, what’s worth dying for? What’s worth having the sacrifice of lives for?

Obama: Well, obviously, American freedom, American lives, America’s national interests.

Warren: What would be your cri-terion for committing troops to end genocide? Like what’s going on in Darfur?

Obama: I don’t think that there is a hard-and-fast line at which you say, “OK, we are going in.” I think it is always a judgment call. The basic principle has to be that if it is within our power to prevent mass killing and genocide – and we can work with the international community to prevent it – then we should act.

Warren: OK. This one is dear to my heart: most people don’t know that there are 148 million orphans in the world – 148 million kids growing up without mums and dads. They don’t need to be in an orphanage, they need to be in families. But a lot of families can’t afford to take these kids in. Would you be willing to consider and even commit to doing some kind of emergency plan for orphans?

Obama: I think it is a great idea. It’s something that we should sit down and figure out – working between nongovernmental organisations, international institutions, and the US government to figure out what we can do. Part of our plan, though, has to be: how do we prevent more orphans in the first place? That means helping to build the public health infrastructure around the world.

Warren: Religious persecution. What do you think the US should do to end religious persecution, for instance in China, in Iraq and in many of our supposed allies? I’m not just talking about persecution of Christianity, but there’s religious persecution around the world that affects millions of people.

Obama: The first thing we have to do is to bear witness and speak out and not pretend that it’s not taking place. Having an administration that’s speaking out, joining in international forums where we can point out human rights abuses and the absence of religious freedom – that, I think, is absolutely critical. One thing that is very important for us to do on all these issues is to lead by example. That’s why it’s so important for us to have religious tolerance here in the US. That’s why it’s so important for us, when we are criticising other countries about the rule of law, to make sure that we’re abiding by rule of law and habeas corpus and we’re not engaging in torture. That gives us a moral standard to talk about these other issues.