[Peace-discuss] Meeting murder

[C. G. Estabrook]

	I met Murder on the way -
	He had a mask like Castlereagh -
	Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
	Seven blood-hounds followed him

	--from The Masque of Anarchy, 1819, by P. B. Shelley, following
	the Peterloo Massacre; Castlereagh was the British foreign minister


Barack Obama should stop killing people.  We seem to think that because someone 
becomes head of government -- particularly the US government -- he can order 
killing without being liable for murder.

That excuse is not accepted by the million people driven from their homes in 
northwest Pakistan by terror attacks by missiles from unmanned American aircraft 
– ordered by Mr. Obama at a rate much greater than that employed by the Bush 
administration – and attacks by the Pakistani army, demanded by Obama's minion, 
Richard Holbrooke.  It's not accepted in the rest of the world, and it should 
not be accepted by us.

Meanwhile, killing ordered by this administration goes on throughout the Middle 
East, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus Vally, and from the Caspian Sea to 
the Horn of Africa.  Obama claims to be “stopping terrorism,” but the world 
knows that that is a contemptible excuse.

The US is instead insisting on control of the Mideast – the source of two-thirds 
of the world's gas and oil. And not because we need it for ourselves – the US 
imports very little oil from the Mideast, in spite of the propaganda claims – 
but because it provides what Obama's foreign policy advisers call “critical 
leverage” over the countries in Europe and Asia, who are our main economic rivals.

Obama's killings continue that constant American policy, which has remained the 
same in both Republican and Democratic administrations.  Only the pretences have 
changed.  --CGE