An ignoble speech
Obama is no better than either Clinton or Bush when it comes to justifying war
By Paul Sawyer 12/24/2009
President Barack Obama revealed a heretofore hidden weakness in his less than noble Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo.
His lack of critical perspective on the US Imperium’s role as an expansive economic and military power was bewildering, considering that he should have known a great deal about this issue after growing up in Hawaii, where the indigenous people have been rolled over by waves of white and Asian newcomers, and in Indonesia, where the overthrow of Sukarno’s independent nationalism by Suharto’s CIA-backed army in 1965 left up to a million supporters of democracy marked for extermination.
His ignorance of the moral and religious dimensions of warfare should have been already signaled by his seeming surprise at the unveiling of Jeremiah Wright’s prophetic anger. This ignoble speech justifying imperial invasion as “just war,” or “necessary and defensive war,” left facts far behind.
First of all, we were not attacked on Sept. 11 from Afghanistan. None of the identified hijackers were Afghans. Their mostly Saudi Arabian planners were based in Europe, Africa and the United States, from where the previous bombings of the Twin Towers and other US facilities were planned. If Osama bin Laden, who would be glad to take credit, were the perpetrator, he was only in Afghanistan because the US did not properly dispose of a good CIA “asset” after spending nearly
15 years funding, supplying and building a strong jihadi fighting force to rid Afghanistan of Soviet influence and occupation.
“Self-defense?” Yes, it is permissible for a nation to immediately defend itself under the UN Charter and international law. However, striking at Afghanistan a month after 9/11 with plans already prepared and no UN authorization — using US special operations personnel in league with brutal warlords who thrive on heroin trade, suffocating prisoners in shipping containers and shooting the survivors after transporting them across the desert — is another story.
Taking over a whole nation ostensibly to capture a camp of al Qaeda, which was already on its way into the mountains en route to Pakistan, was an excuse to grab the geography for a pipeline that the Taliban government (which we had recognized with cash payments) had already agreed to let Unocal build.
Then the US appointed Zalmay Khalizad, a Unocal adviser, to be ambassador to Afghanistan and plenipotentiary over the savaged remnants. This war hardly began as a “defensive war,” and is less so now.
“Just War?” What does Obama know about the rules laid out by St. Augustine, an early shaper of that doctrine for the Roman Catholic Church? He made it a main condition that civilians must not be targeted. The day before Obama announced the escalation of the war, 15 civilians were killed by a robotized drone in Pakistan, where the Pakistan government has not admitted to giving permission for the US to attack the people of their country.
How can there be, by any stretch of the imagination, a just war conducted by this expansionist Imperium — not just the two wars in Iraq and Af-Pakistan, but also in Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Somalia, Gaza and the many other places around the world?
As for the Balkans, which Obama referred to as “humanitarian’ intervention,” ask the Kosovars and Serbs about that conflict, in which Bill Clinton set the table for illegal US/NATO intervention in violation of the UN Charter (a treaty which is supposedly “the law of the land”). Ask the dead children in the schools, the sick in the hospitals, the workers in the Chinese embassy, the Belgrade citizens standing in the “socialized” factories — all those upon whom Clinton’s and retired Gen. Wesley Clark’s bombs were unleashed.
Oh, that’s right. Many of them are dead and cannot answer, casualties of the German, French, US and British press to dismember Yugoslavia.
“The biggest mistake we made,” Jim Baker, Bush One’s secretary of state, later admitted, was “when, with the insistence of Germany, we prematurely recognized Slovenia and Croatia before agreements were reached to minimize the possibility of civil war.”
In today’s world, it seems the phrase “spreading democracy,” which in Imperium-speak translates into guaranteeing “free markets” (or clearing a playground for multinational corporations), holds much the same meaning to Obama as it did for his predecessors, and that’s not only disappointing, but really bad news for the noble cause of peace.
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Paul Sawyer was a great minister who married my wife and I, several years ago, in Berkeley, where he was minister of the Unitarian Universalist church. As a Harvard graduate who worked hard for justice in our world, his words are appreciated greatly by me and many I have spoken with, whose lives were improved because of his presence. Paul's words here, in the pulpit and in all of his daily discourse, were not crazy. They were inspiring.
posted by bbrecken on 12/30/10 @ 01:41 p.m.
I look to the PW for silly, out of touch, hippie nonsense like this for entertainment. Thank you!
I didn't vote for BO... I didn't partake in the Hope-a-dope parade, but I absolutely LOVED his Nobel acceptance speech for all the layers of irony... Liberal democrat explains the notion of just war to anti-war Europeans who had just awarded the president with the Nobel Peace Prize... It was a great speech. Read it: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-offi...
As for charges of "clearing playgrounds", well, you can't argue with crazy.