White House Audacity

Obama: trying to fool us to the bitter end. How do you like that “Lesser Evil” now?

by SHAMUS COOKE
Some careful listening has exposed the lie that a U.S. attack (war) against Syria would be, as Obama put it, “a shot across the bow,” i.e. a “tiny war.” But even before the first missile is launched the birth of Obama’s baby war began to grow, and when it’s eventually unleashed it will resemble any other fully matured war, complete with massive destruction, the death of untold innocents and yet another Middle Eastern nation torn to pieces.

The debated Syrian war resolution in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee saw the infancy of “limited strikes” quickly evolve into “altering the balance of forces” between Assad and the U.S.-backed rebels. Out of the Senate committee emerged a fully mature war, hell bent on regime change, though clothed in bureaucrat-speak to fool the American public. The resolution includes:

“It is the policy of the United States to change the momentum on the battlefield in Syria so as to create favorable conditions for a negotiated settlement that ends the conflict and leads to a democratic government in Syria.”

Translation: regime change.

Obama himself used the language of regime change to sell the war to the Republicans, though again, hidden in a swamp of words:

“[the attack on Syria] also fits into a broader strategy that can bring about over time the kind of strengthening of the opposition and the diplomatic, economic and political pressure required — so that ultimately we have a transition [regime change] that can bring peace and stability, not only to Syria but to the region.”

[pullquote] And what are the Obamabots saying now that their idol is pushing the world to perhaps its final global conflict?  [/pullquote]

Now that the regime change motives are out in the open, a “real” war becomes all the more necessary, since Obama’s prized rebels — dominated by Islamic extremists — have encountered defeat after defeat by the Syrian Government, and need more than “limited strikes” to alter the balance of force.

Regime change, however, has been in the works long before recent events, having been the official policy of the U.S. towards Syria for at least two years, when Obama began intervening with weapons, funding, and training for the U.S.-backed rebels. During this time Obama also hand picked a group of rich Syrian exiles that the U.S. government still recognizes as the legitimate government of Syria, which of course presumes a change of regime.

The conflict in Syria would have ended — and tens of thousands of lives spared — without Obama and his allies — especially Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan — fueling the carnage with foreign fighters and massive arms trafficking. To think that Obama’s current projected bombing campaign can somehow be separated from the previous two years of regime change foreign policy is the height of political naivety.

Several news outlets have reported on the more than “limited” nature of Obama’s proposed missile strikes. ABC News expressed shock when they received information about the war preparations, since they were anything but “surgical.”

The ABC broadcast mentions the use of B-2, and B-52 bombers, as well as using the “vast majority” of the 200 tomahawk missiles fired from five Navy Destroyers already stationed off the coast of Syria. There is also a U.S. aircraft carrier in the region capable of deploying F-16 fighter jets.

The broadcast quotes a military official as saying that the Syrian shock-and-awe assault “could do more damage to Assad’s forces in 48 hours than the rebels have done in two years of civil war.”, i.e. a major military operation.

Add to this that there are already U.S. troops with “boots on the ground” in Turkey and Jordan, training and arming U.S.-backed rebels and operating more advanced missile systems. The French newspaper Le Figaro,reported that hundreds of these U.S. troops and opposition fighters have already entered Syria recently, no doubt in connection with Obama’s “limited strikes.”

Syria’s government has said that it would defend itself if attacked, a fact dismissed by the Obama Administration and the U.S. media. Secretary of State John Kerry arrogantly stated:

“Let me say again unequivocally, bluntly: If Assad is arrogant enough and foolish enough to retaliate to the consequences of his own criminal activity, the United States and our allies have ample ways to make him regret that decision without going to war.”

Kerry’s nonsense flips reality on its head: In Kerry’s fantasy world Syria is not being attacked by a foreign nation (the U.S.) but merely retaliated against, which doesn’t give Syria the right to defend itself (!) But if Assad does defend Syria by returning fire on an attacking Navy vessel, for example, the U.S. will “make him regret it”…. “without going to war” (?!)   Of course, war begins when Obama fires the first missile.

And this is exactly what the American public is not prepared for. Any capable sovereign nation would defend itself from such an attack, and would have every right to do so under international law. The Obama Administration — who would be breaking international law — is trying to skew the public debate in the U.S. to fit his fantasy world version of a war scenario.

If the Syrian government defends itself from U.S. attack, Obama will express “shock and outrage,” and demand that the war be escalated, possibly to include targeting Iran and Hezbollah, two entities long in the U.S.-Israeli crosshairs. The result is a catastrophic regional war that includes the possibility of becoming a global war, based on Russia and China’s reaction to the mayhem.

There are other hints that Obama has been planning for regime change for his recent war plans.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Obama was already meeting with regional allies for “contingency plans” in case the Assad regime happened to collapse due to the “limited strikes.” The contingency plans would be more aptly named “regime change” plans, which aim to ensure that a pro-U.S. regime takes power in Syria.

Obama has also hinted that he understands an assault on Syria would provoke a regional war, which is likely why he recently withdrew U.S. embassy staff in several countries surrounding Syria, while warning Americans not to travel to Turkey and Lebanon and “to be alert to the potential for violence.”

Of course, a U.S. war against Syria would instantly pour over its borders, since Israel has already bombed Syria four times in recent months, while the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon are crossed to funnel massive amounts of weapons while receiving millions of Syrian war refugees in exchange.

These are the regional implications that are keeping even the most submissive U.S. allies away from a war against Syria. The usual U.S. puppets like the Arab League and Britain have not endorsed an attack on Syria, while the UN also denied authorization.

So for Obama the most difficult aspect of waging war against Syria has been legitimizing it, giving it some kind of “legal” authorization, shallow as it will eventually be. Starting a war without some kind of justifiable cover would be politically costly on the foreign and domestic level, and already has been; the Obama Administration is going down in flames as it tries to revive its stillborn war.

The problem is that the same lies he used to start war in Libya cannot be recycled so easily. The UN Security Council and much of the rest of the world has learned its lessons; Obama’s “Humanitarian Intervention” in Libya to “protect civilians” instantly transformed to regime change after the first bomb fell.

Of course, Obama is combining his Libya lies with the deception of George Bush, who had “concrete” evidence that Iraq had WMD’s. Like Bush, Obama has presented no evidence that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack; while ignoring that a previous chemical weapons attack in Syria was blamed on the rebels by the UN. Even several U.S.Congressmen who were recently shown the “top secret evidence” to prove that the Syrian government is responsible for the attack left “unimpressed.”

If Obama conjures up the audacity to wage war in Syria under such political isolation, it will be a watershed moment in U.S. history, marking a crucial moment of decline in U.S. influence abroad. But the same is true if Obama doesn’t attack; the weakness of U.S. foreign policy will likewise be exposed due to Obama’s ability to follow through with his threats due to lack of allies and domestic dissent.

Either way the U.S. elites who benefit directly from foreign wars — or by dominating international markets — will be doubly motivated to wage even more war in the future, since U.S. hegemony is no longer capable of exerting power through economic means alone. This makes it all the more important that the U.S. anti-war movement re-assert itself, and combine with the Labor Movement to demand a national set of new priorities that demand that the U.S. government attack the jobs crisis and U.S. poverty with a federal jobs program, instead of foreign nations that are no threat to the United States.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker and an elected officer of SEIU 503. He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

A Letter to President Obummer

Reliable imperialist hawk Hillary Clinton is being deployed by Obama to pressure Congress. Team Obama will not take NO for an answer.

by RALPH NADER

Dear President Obama:

Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii, watching you race up and down the basketball court, know how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber”.

Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.

Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew your background as a child of third world countries, a community organizer, a scholar of constitutional law and a critic of the Bush/Cheney years, never would have expected you to favor the giant warfare state so pleasing to the military industrial complex.

Now, as if having learned nothing from the devastating and costly aftermaths of the military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, you’re beating the combustible drums to attack Syria – a country that is no threat to the U.S. and is embroiled in complex civil wars under a brutal regime.

This time, however, you may have pushed for too many acts of War. Public opinion and sizable numbers of members of both parties in Congress are opposed. These lawmakers oppose bombing Syria in spite of your corralling the cowardly leaders of both parties in the Congress.

Thus far, your chief achievement on the Syrian front has been support for your position from al-Qaeda affiliates fighting in Syria, the pro-Israeli government lobby, AIPAC, your chief nemesis in Congress, House Speaker John Boehner, and Dick Cheney. This is quite a gathering and a telling commentary on your ecumenical talents. Assuming the veracity of your declarations regarding the regime’s resort to chemical warfare (first introduced into the Middle East by Winston Churchill’s Royal Air Force’s plastering of Iraqi tribesmen in the nineteen twenties), your motley support group is oblivious to the uncontrollable consequences that might stem from bombing Syria. One domestic consequence may be that Speaker Boehner expects to exact concessions from you on domestic issues before Congress in return for giving you such high visibility bipartisan cover.

[pullquote] In Kerry’s view, bombing a country with missiles and air force bombers is not an act of war. [/pullquote]

Your argument for shelling Syria is to maintain “international credibility” in drawing that “red line” regardless, it seems, of the loss of innocent Syrian civilian life, causalities to our foreign service and armed forces in that wider region, and retaliation against the fearful Christian population in Syria (one in seven Syrians are Christian). But the more fundamental credibilities are to our Constitution, to the neglected necessities of the American people, and to the red line of observing international law and the UN Charter (which prohibit unilateral bombing in this situation).

There is another burgeoning cost – that of the militarization of the State Department whose original charter invests it with the responsibility of diplomacy. Instead, Mr. Obama you have shaped the State Department into a belligerent “force projector” first under Generalissima Clinton and now under Generalissimo Kerry. The sidelined foreign service officers, who have knowledge and conflict avoidance experience, are left with reinforced fortress-like embassies as befits our Empire reputation abroad.

Secretary John Kerry descended to gibberish when, under questioning this week by a House Committee member, he asserted that your proposed attack was “not war” because there would be “no boots on the ground.” In Kerry’s view, bombing a country with missiles and air force bombers is not an act of war.

It is instructive to note how government autocracy feeds on itself. Start with unjustified government secrecy garnished by the words “national security.” That leads to secret laws, secret evidence, secret courts, secret prisons, secret prisoners, secret relationships with selected members of Congress, denial of standing for any citizen to file suit, secret drone strikes, secret incursions into other nations and all this directed by a President who alone decides when to be secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. What a Republic, what a democracy, what a passive people we have become!

Voices of reason and experience have urged the proper path away from the metastasizing war that is plaguing Syria. As proposed by former president, Jimmy Carter, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and other seasoned diplomats and retired military, vigorous leadership by you is needed for an international peace conference with all parties at the table, including the countries supplying weapons to the various adversaries in Syria.

Mr. Obama, you may benefit from reading the writings of Colman McCarthy, a leading advocate of peace studies in our schools and universities. He gives numerous examples of how waging peace avoided war and civil strife over the past 100 years.

Crowding out attention to America’s serious domestic problems by yet another military adventure (opposed by many military officials) , yet another attack on another small, non-threatening Muslim country by the powerful Christian nation (as many Muslims see it) is aggression camouflaging sheer madness.

Please, before you recklessly flout Congress, absorb the wisdom of the World Peace Foundation’s Alex de Waal and Bridget Conley-Zilkic.  Writing in the New York Times, they strongly condemn the use of nerve gas in Syria, brand the perpetrators as war criminals to be tried by an international war crimes tribunal and then declare:

“But it is folly to think that airstrikes can be limited: they are ill-conceived as punishment, fail to protect civilians and, most important, hinder peacemaking…. Punishment, protection and peace must be joined… An American assault on Syria would be an act of desperation with incalculable consequences. To borrow once more from Sir William Harcourt [the British parliamentarian who argued against British intervention in our Civil War (which cost 750,000 American lives)]: ‘We are asked to go we know not whither, in order to do we know not what.’”

If and when the people and Congress turn you down this month, there will be one silver lining. Only a Right/Left coalition can stop this warring. Such convergence is strengthening monthly in the House of Representatives to stop future war crimes and the injurious blowback against America of the wreckages from Empire.

History teaches that Empires always devour themselves.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.