Obama – Antiwar.com Blog

Obama’s Hiroshima Speech Was Lovely, Frustrating, and Infuriating

11796415_934981119876529_3032773539452310147_n President Obama’s #apology tour keeps a-rollin’ on, am I right? No, hang on.

As unforgivable as Obama has been on foreign policy in myriad ways — and how much worse, perhaps, a Clinton or any Republican ever might be with the help of Obama’s drone precedents — there is something about him which almost looks like better than it could be. At least in certain lights. That is to say, Obama kills people, but he also occasionally appears to notice that the US has made foreign policy mistakes. This is what the hawks and right-wingers dub the apology tour, even though “sorry” never crosses the president’s lips when he’s discussing the heavy handed US response to 9/11, or admitting America’s role in the 1953 coup in Iran.

Obama is the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima. The opening act for his visit to the site of the first nuclear bomb ever dropped on human beings was Secretary of State John Kerry, who went last month. Kerry’s delicate acknowledgement that the bombing was a tragedy gave conservatives a case of indigestion. Obama’s Friday speech may make them lose their minds entirely. Continue reading “Obama’s Hiroshima Speech Was Lovely, Frustrating, and Infuriating”

Petition: Investigate Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Prize Foundation and other Nobel Prize Awarding Institutions should be thanked for their century-long efforts to educate and hopefully bring about more peace in the world. At the same time, however, these institutions must be made aware that their efforts are increasingly undermined, and deeply perverted by their growing departure from the original criteria set forth in Alfred Nobel’s will for selecting the recipient of the Peace Prize. Such continual disregard of the original intent of the “Peace” Prize actually serves to enable the waging of war, fulfilling Orwell’s prediction about how propaganda works in making people believe that “war is peace”. Obviously the majority of officials and people involved with the various Nobel Organizations and Nobel Peace Forum sponsors are not intending to do this, to help the cause of war and militarism. They simply have not conducted the self examination necessary to realize how seriously off-track the Peace Prize has gone. Similarly it took a lot for Alfred Nobel himself to see the light, that his invention of dynamite would be used for violent wars and murder. So it’s understandable how so many organizers and sponsors could simply be oblivious to the underlying problem. The purpose of our on-line petition is to get more Nobel Peace Prize officials to critically think!

Petition: Investigate Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize
Continue reading “Petition: Investigate Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize”

Obama Should Veto NDAA to Save the Republic

The political, military industrial, corporate class in Washington DC continues to re-make our constitutional republic into a powerful, unaccountable military empire. On Thursday, the US Senate voted 93 to 7 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012 which allows the military to operate domestically within the borders of the United States and to possibly (or most probably) detain US citizens without trial. Forget that the ACLU called it “an historic threat to American citizens”, this bill is so dangerous not only to our rights but to our country’s security that it was criticized by the Directors of the FBI, the CIA, the National Intelligence Director and the US Defense Secretary! For the first time in our history, if this Act is not vetoed, American citizens may not be guaranteed their Article III right to trial.
Continue reading “Obama Should Veto NDAA to Save the Republic”

How War-Monger-in-Chief Will Again Get the “Peace” Vote

Politicians constantly utter what they know to be falsehoods in order to garner votes and high esteem from an ignorant electorate. The latest and greatest of such sideshows is – and will be – Obama’s war in Afghanistan.

Military and administration officials have repeatedly explained that the Afghan war will continue long past Obama’s fabled December 2014 deadline for withdrawal. Top British commander, Lieutenant General James Bucknall, said the other day that “December, 2014, is not the end of the campaign. It’s a long-term commitment,” and that “we will reduce numbers – but we will not go away.”

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said just last week that “We will not take our leave” in 2014 and that it’s too early to tell how large the occupation would be after the deadline and for how long it would last. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, too, has said “It is clear that no one is rushing to the exit.”

US General John Allen, the new commander of the occupation of Afghanistan, last week disavowed the 2014 date, saying “we’re actually going to be here for a long time.”

The Daily Telegraph confirmed that Obama administration officials were working on a deal with the Afghan government to have a large scale occupation – at least 25,000 troops and many more contractors – through 2024. And people thought ten years in Afghanistan was a lot.

The Obama administration’s so-called shift in war strategy – from country-wide military occupation to targeted special operations and training missions – is Orwellian claptrap for more of the same. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, in remarks in Washington in mid-September, said that by 2014 “the US remaining force will be basically an enduring presence force focused on counterterrorism.” The technocratic pedantry obscures the reality that the war will continue.

Yet, watch and see in the upcoming 2012 campaign how much Obama will use this 2014 date as a stump speech to coddle gullible Obama voters into casting their ballots – again – for a reincarnation of their supposed nemesis, George W. Bush. See if Obama gets reelected on a promise that the war in Afghanistan has nearly ended (that is, if recession-conscious Americans can conceive of going to the ballot box with any intention other than voting themselves other peoples’ money).

As a matter of fact, watch how much Obama’s similarly broken promises vis-à-vis ending the Iraq war will be completely stricken from the presidential debates. The Obama administration has spent years badgering the Iraqis into accepting a large contingency of US troops and contractors to remain in Iraq beyond the December 2011 deadline for a full withdrawal. To push this through, Maliki circumvented the Iraqi Parliament to make the decision dictatorially. Now that Obama has succeeded in strong-arming the continuation of the US occupation of Iraq, they are demanding US soldiers maintain immunity from Iraqi law.

Unfortunately for Obama, the Bush administration failed to secure a deal for a full scale contingency of tens of thousands of troops in Iraq indefinitely. Back in 2007 Bush administration had drafted the first Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) which detailed a prolonged and continued US troop presence in Iraq with no specified limits and called for “facilitating and encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments” and for US forces to work indefinitely to “deter foreign aggression against Iraq.” This was overly egregious for Iraqis and couldn’t pass muster in Iraqi politics. Thus the 2008 SOFA demanding full pullout in December 2011. Too bad for Obama, since he almost certainly would have signed on to that plan and is now trying to resurrect it.

These realities about Obama’s Iraq policies are unlikely to receive more than 60 seconds of air time in the presidential debates or in the uncritical after-debate punditry. Afghanistan will get some focus, but Obama will insist – beyond all the evidence and repeated admissions by top military and administration officials – that the end is right around the corner, after all the “progress” he’s made in Afghanistan. And Americans will simply nod, acquiesce, and then vote.

The March of Obama’s Dark Cynicism

Obama spent several minutes this afternoon droning on and stuttering about the economy, injecting words like “folks” and “busted” into his typically boring speech as recommended by his handlers to get the plebes to relate more to His Harvardness. Among the many things he mentioned as a solution to the United States’ unprecedentedly massive deficit and debt are raising taxes on corporate jet owners, oil companies, other rich boogeymen, and salami-slicing entitlements, and more. Otherwise, he said, we won’t be able to subsidize the waste of young life that is grades 13-17, aka “college”; we won’t have medical research despite the fact that, well, we will; and gasp! a possible threat somehow to the efficacy of food inspection — you don’t want to die of e. coli do you? DO YOU?

But you know what jet owners he didn’t mention? Boeing and other military contractors. And rightly so — why bring attention to the biggest crony capitalists on the face of the earth, those who are most responsible for our deficits and destroyed economy. Those to whom we are forced to donate trillions of dollars and from whom we get NOTHING of use. That would just make Americans pay more attention to the real damage to our economy and liberties done by his glorious little “humanitarian” bombing projects across the earth.

Later, Obama repeated the Benghazi Myth of Libya intervention, as usual.

“This operation is limited in time and scope,” something he said in the beginning — “days, not weeks” — but since then we have no update on the exact “limit.” More rhetoric included Gadhafi’s alleged sponsoring of terror against the United States — 25 years ago, way before we had reengaged with his regime. This is all yawn-inducing stuff, rehashed from other cynical speeches, typical of the tortured justifications of the Bush and Obama administrations.

The president then said something so breathtaking on the question of the War Powers Act that I had to rewind to make sure I heard him right:

“I don’t even have to get to the constitutional question.”

The President of the United States, a so-called Constitutional scholar, and whose job it is to uphold the Constitution, thinks there are times, let alone of WAR, when he can take action without even thinking about the document that is the framework of the very entity that he himself heads?

Okay. Does anyone see this getting better?

Somalia Spin Could Make You Dizzy

Actually, that seems to be the very point of idiotic statements by none other than the President of the United States, shocking I know, referring to the recent Uganda bombings, such as:

“On the one hand, you have a vision of an Africa on the move, an Africa that is unified, an Africa that is modernising and creating opportunities, and on the other hand, you’ve got a vision of al-Qaeda and al-Shabab that is about destruction and death.”

I wonder what Mr. Obama thinks the “vision” is exactly when Ugandan troops randomly — regrettably imprecisely, our man might say — shell Mogadishu neighborhoods in the general direction of those al-Shabaab crazies and blow up children playing (yes!) soccer. Oh but you see, just like Israel killing 10 times more Palestinians than vice versa, not to mention uncountable-fold Lebanese, the Ugandans have a purity of arms insomuch as that they didn’t intentionally target those inconveniently playful kids that they nonetheless turned into sausage filling.

Telling though, this use of the word “vision” to describe Africa, a place which despite his patrilineage does not help to inform the president as to what daily life could possibly be like there. Obama is reduced to having vague “visions” of the dark continent, which is fine, really, because as long as it serves him really well as a talking point — and it does — then for him it’s all good. And if his boys can call al-Qaeda “racist” while this iron is hot, MAN is that ever for the better! To wit:

An administration official went further, saying that the Ugandan attacks show that “al-Qaeda is a racist organisation that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life”.

It almost justifies the billion or so dollars a minute spent trying to make Afghanistan a Jeffersonian democracy and chase out the literal hovel-full of “al-Qaeda” members, doesn’t it?

No.

And anyway, mentioning al-Qaeda when talking about al-Shabaab is so unbelievably far from the real state of things as to expose the president either as a complete moron incapable of reason or a Machiavellian scumbag befitting the ranks of some of history greatest scoundrels. Oh, haha, I know — YES, UNbelievably. I am indeed shocked all the time by these people despite their past idiocies and transgressions upon civilized decency. But back on track here, al-Shabaab is to al-Qaeda as the FARC is to Marx. The former are inspired by the ideals of the latter. That’s the end of this connection, especially considering as mentioned above and elsewhere by none other than the director of the CIA that Classic “al-Qaeda” numbers maybe 100 men. No, there are no zeros left off of this figure. That’s like a billion bucks per year per bad guy, effectively zero of whom US troops have ever captured or confirmed killed.

Where was I? Oh yes, Obama is a goddamned liar and you should laugh at him until he is mercifully out of office and we no longer have to hear from “progressives” that the war is over despite even more people dying all the damn time.