[Peace-discuss] Obama's war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This is the most recent version of my introduction to AWARE's cablecast, "AWARE on the Air," seen Tuesdays at 10pm on <urbanapublictelevision.org>, on TV or online. We record the program - unrehearsed - Tuesdays at noon in the Urbana City Council chambers; members and friends of AWARE are invited to attend and/or participate.] 

Obama's War

It's the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, and approaching the twelfth anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Whenever the American people have voted on the matter in those years, they've voted against war, but the US government continues to massacre people around the world

This program, recorded on 12 March 2013, is devoted to discussing the Obama administration's widening of these wars in southwest Asia and north Africa, and the political conditions in the US that make Obama's mass murder possible. You may have noticed that the president doesn't seem to want to talk much about the war, much less tell the truth about it.

In his Inaugural Address in January, President Obama said, “A decade of war is now ending,” but that's not true, and of course he knows it's not true. There is in fact no plan to end US combat, even in Afghanistan – only an announced goal to lower troop levels - and the number of remaining troops keeps growing, in spite of the opposition even of the puppet president we installed in Afghanistan.

In his State of the Union Speech last month, President Obama announced "that 34,000 of the 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will be brought back to the United States within 12 months." But that will leave more US troops in Afghanistan than were there when Obama became president.

But Obama's war is by no means limited to "AFPAK," the late Richard Holbrook's coinage for the theatre of war that includes Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Obama administration announced quietly this winter that it is deploying troops in thirty-five African countries - beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger.

"It is as if Africa's proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master's black colonial elite whose 'historic mission,' warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of 'a capitalism rampant though camouflaged'" [John Pilger].

It's the Obama administration - as much or more than the "terrorists" - who want war in the Mideast and Africa, consistently with the policy followed by all US administrations for more than a generation. An ongoing war gives the US a justification for military control of the world's energy-producing region.

Today the US government is threatening, invading, and occupying countries in a vast circle with a 2500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf, from north Africa to the borders of India and China, a region sometimes called "the Greater Middle East" - the US military calls it "Central Command." This region has the world's greatest concentration of oil and natural gas, and our government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars, month after month, to control it. Control and not just access to these energy resources is what our government demands. We in fact import little of our own oil supplies from the Mideast - most of it comes from the western hemisphere, notably Canada and Venezuela. but control of world energy supplies gives the us an unparalleled advantage over our economic rivals in Europe and Asia - notably China and Germany.

This past June, the Senate Committee chaired by President Obama's new Secretary of State, John Kerry, released a report describing how Washington needs to maintain key military bases and troop presence throughout the Middle East, which is vital because the region is “home to more than half of the world’s oil reserves and over a third of its natural gas.”

“The United States should preserve the model of ‘lily pad’ bases throughout the Gulf,” said the report, “which permits the rapid escalation of military force,” enabling “the United States to quickly deploy its superior conventional force should conflict arise.”

In other words, President Obama is killing men, women and children in Asia and Africa in our name - because China and other countries need oil, and our government intends to have control where they get it. Our government says that we are conducting these vastly expensive wars to stop terrorism and protect civilians - but we can see that, instead, we're killing civilians and creating terrorists. These wars are not in Americans' interest, because it's the 1% who profit from them, through armaments and oil.

The Obama administration’s innovation in the US war in the Mideast and Africa is to add assassinations - by drone or death squad. The US "Special Operations Command" is now - amazingly - active in 120 countries, according to the Command's spokesman; President Obama has killed between 3,000 and 5,000 people - including at least 200 children - with drone attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen - countries with which we are not at war (and some of which are supposed to be 'allies.')

The US and NATO have bombed and killed Muslims in eight countries during the Obama administration - after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Mali and the Philippines (and that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the US and its clients).

In different circumstances, President Obama recently said, "There’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders." (He was speaking of Israel.) Of course that's exactly what Obama is doing, including killing American citizens with his rockets.

Obama's problem is the American people, who - in spite of the cheerleading for the war by the media - do not want more war. Therefore he wants to find an effective way to lie to them that the war is "winding down," even as he expands it.

President Bush kidnapped people around the world and tortured them in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in pursuit of US foreign policy: Obama simply murders them. History will record that our chief executive is a practiced liar, as well as a murderer.

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'AWARE', THE ANTI-WAR ANTI-RACISM EFFORT OF C-U, IS MADE UP OF PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE THAT IF AMERICANS ACTUALLY KNEW WHAT THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS DOING IN THEIR NAME, THEY WOULD BE APPALLED. 

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