Liar-in-Chief
By Paul Street
September 15, 2013 - I could barely make out Barack Obama’s Syria speech to the nation on my old car radio as I negotiated the narrow curves of Route 79 on the western banks of the Mississippi River in central Missouri last Tuesday night. What I could hear sounded very much like more of Obama’s by now standard if stunning arch-mendacity.
September 15, 2013 - I could barely make out Barack Obama’s Syria speech to the nation on my old car radio as I negotiated the narrow curves of Route 79 on the western banks of the Mississippi River in central Missouri last Tuesday night. What I could hear sounded very much like more of Obama’s by now standard if stunning arch-mendacity.
“To Take This Debate to Congress”
That is certainly a lie. He did no such thing
in the case of Libya, subjected to a five-week U.S. bombing
campaign (though it posed no “direct or imminent threat to
[Americans’] security”) because he didn’t have to,
politically. This time it’s different, as the liberal
Middle East historian Juan
Cole has explained: “Obama did not need Congress in
the case of Libya. He had the Arab League, the UN Security
Council, and NATO…But [he has] became more and more isolated
[on Syria]. The Arab League declined to call for
intervention... Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and other Arab
countries forthrightly denounced the idea of foreign
military intervention in Syria, a very different stance than
many of them took in 2011 with regard to Libya…Then NATO
declined to get involved, with Poland, Belgium, and others
expressing reluctance…Then the British Parliament followed
suit.” Failure
to garner any meaningful fig leaf of formal international
support is why Obama ran to Congress this time.
“I Possess the Authority”
Obama claimed he has gone to Congress “even
though I possess the authority to order military strikes.”
The former “liberal” constitutional law professor with a
degree from Harvard Law certainly knows that the U.S.
Constitution grants war-making authority in Congress alone.
He should know further that it is thoroughly criminal under
international law for him to attack any sovereign nation in
the absence of any direct or imminent threat to the U.S.
Claims of Humanitarian Concern
Obama’s claim to be moved to act by civilian
deaths in Syria, citing the horrors of “children writhing in
pain, and going still on a cold hospital floor.” This claim
is contradicted by the grim determination with which he has
regularly murdered innocent civilians (including large
numbers of women and children) in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere – “collateral damage” in the
dirty global war on/of terror he inherited from Cheney-Bush
and then expanded. One horrific example – neither the first
nor the last among many – occurred in the May of 2009.
That’s when
U.S. air-strikes killed 140 civilians in Bola
Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah Province.
Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S.
explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or
older. Villagers brought
tractor trailers full of the pieces of human
bodies to the provincial governor’s office to prove that the
casualties had occurred. “Everyone at the governor’s office
was crying, watching that shocking scene,” one observer
reported.”[2]
The initial response of the Obama
administration and Pentagon to this appalling incident (one
of many mass civilian-butchering U.S. aerial killings in
Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world
under Obama) was to absurdly blame the civilian deaths on
“Taliban grenades.” Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton expressed “regret” about the loss of innocent life,
but the administration refused to issue an apology or
acknowledge U.S. responsibility for the blasting apart of
civilian bodies in Farah Province.[3]
The matter was quickly dropped and forgotten,
sent down George Orwell’s memory hole, with deep media
complicity, as the Pentagon wrote checks to the Afghan
government to give families a couple thousand dollars per
corpse. The U.S. subsequently conducted a dubious
“investigation” that reduced the civilian body count
drastically and blamed the Taliban for putting civilians in
the way of U.S. bombs.[4]
There have been many crimes like Bola Boluk
under Obama. People who command glass houses of a
sociopathic, mass-murderous empire should not expect to be
taken seriously when throw “humanitarian” stones at other
butchers.
If Obama is so dismayed by the spectacle of a
government “killing its own people,” why is he not calling
for missile strikes against the military dictatorship in
Egypt, which recently slaughtered hundreds if not thousands
of civilians to stop popular protests against the regime? Is
it okay to kill your own civilians as long as you are a
U.S.-allied regime and/or do the killing with “conventional”
weapons?
But why does Obama think we should believe
that he can advance humanitarian goals by lobbying cruise
missiles at anyone? Two days after Obama’s speech, the
New York Times published an Opinion-Editorial from
Russian president Vladimir Putin. “The potential strike by
the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition
from many countries and major political and religious
leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent
victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict
far beyond Syria’s borders,” Putin reasonably observed. “A
strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of
terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to
resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the
Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire
system of international law and order out of balance.”[5]
Selective History and Terrible Weapons
In his discussion of the past horrors of
chemical weapons (by European powers during World War I and
by the Nazi holocaust) last Tuesday night, Obama deleted the
United States’ vicious deployment of dioxin during the
Vietnam War. That example of chemical warfare caused an
explosion of birth defects among other terrible results in
Southeast Asia. The president also failed to mention that
Washington helped Saddam Hussein use nerve gas against
Iranian soldiers and the U.S. Marines used white phosphorous
in their massive assaults on the civilian population of
Fallujah, Iraq in November of 2004.
Will Obama threaten Tel Aviv with cruise
missiles for using white phosphorous against Palestinian
civilians in Gaza? Of course not: the Palestinians are
officially unworthy victims, like the East Timorese and
countless others who have been killed and tortured by
governments that are allied with the inherently good United
States and therefore officially incapable (like the U.S.) of
crimes against humanity.
Obama painted out Syria as a rogue state
because it has not signed a treaty against chemical weapons
like “189 governments that represent 98 percent of
humanity.” He did not mention that Syria’s neighbors Syria
and Egypt (both U.S. allies) have also not signed the
treaty.
Obama had nothing to say, of course, about
the even greater dreadfulness of nuclear and radioactive
ordnance. The U.S. stands alone in having incinerated and
poisoned civilians with atomic weapons – quite unnecessarily
in August of 1945. And thanks to America’s deployment of
depleted uranium in Iraq, the toxic legacy of the U.S.
attacks on Fallujah was worse was that of the atom-bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An epidemic of cancer, leukemia,
and birth defects quickly followed in Fallujah.[5A]
“We Know the Assad Regime was Responsible”
“We know,” Obama said, “the Assad regime was
responsible” for the Syrian chemical weapons attack of
August 21, 2013. Not so. The proof offered by the president,
a former lawyer, was hardly impressive. It contained nothing
remotely like a smoking gun. Obama made no attempt to
disprove other theories of what might have happened,
including some German journalists’ finding that the attack
was conducted by a rogue Syrian officer acting without
Assad’s approval. Nor did he address what left commentator
Glen Ford rightly calls “credible reports (everybody’s
reports are more credible than the Americans) that rebels
under U.S. allied control were told to prepare to go on the
offensive following an American retaliation to chemical
attack that would be blamed on Assad’s forces.”[6]
“No one doubts that poison gas was used in
Syria,” Putin wrote in his Times editorial: “But
there is every reason to believe it was used not by the
Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke
intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be
siding with [Islamic] fundamentalists.” That is a reasonable
judgment.
Nobody should doubt the monstrosity of the
Assad regime, but Obama’s proof of Assad’s culpability for
the attack in questions amounts pretty much to this:
“because I say so.”
“These Things Happened:” The Memory Hole
“When dictators commit atrocities, they
depend upon the world to look the other way until those
horrifying pictures fade from memory,” Obama said. “But
these things happened. The facts cannot be denied.”
An interesting thing to hear from an American
president! “From
the end of World War Two through the present, the U.S.
Empire has caused "the extinction and suffering of countless
human beings. The United States," William Blum Pilger noted
eight years ago, "attempted to overthrow fifty governments,
many of them democracies, and to crush thirty popular
movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process,
twenty-five countries were bombed, causing the loss of
several million lives and the despair of millions more."[7]
The leading American imperial crimes include
a massive U.S. assault on the peasant nation of Vietnam – an
epic attack that killed 3 million Indochinese – and the
illegal invasion of oil-rich Mesopotamia, whose terrible
human consequences (including at least 2 million Iraqis
dying prematurely) remain essentially unmentionable in
“mainstream” (dominant) U.S. media. Chemical weapons were
deployed in both of these grand imperial transgressions.
Over these decades, the U.S. has been what
Noam Chomsky calls “ a rogue state, the leading rogue state,
radically violating international law, refusing to accept
international convention” and even maintaining
“self-authorization to commit genocide.”[8]
Is it any wonder that, as Putin noted in the
Times, “Millions
around the world …see America not as a model of democracy
but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling
coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us
or against us’” (emphasis added).
“The Anchor of Global Security”
There should be little surprise that
knowledgeable observers the world over cringe and/or roll
their eyes when U.S. presidents say things like this, from
Obama’s Tuesday night address:”My
fellow Americans, for nearly seven decades, the United
States has been the anchor of global security…The burdens of
leadership are often heavy, but the world is a better place
because we have borne them” (emphasis added).
That is a blatant lie, as Obama surely knows.
Tell it to the survivors of the millions who have been
snuffed out by rogue state America, consistently identified
by the global populace for many years as the leading threat
to peace and security in the world. Tell it to the people of
Chile. Two days ago they commemorated the 40th anniversary
of their 9/11 – the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew
the democratically elected government of socialist president
Salvador Allende. The coup was assisted and supported by
Washington, determined to install a vicious military
dictatorship that executed thousands of leftists and others
and became a leading center of international terror. The
U.S. would not permit the continued existence of democratic
socialist government in “our hemisphere.”
What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., say
about Obama’s claim that the U.S. has been “the anchor of
global security” since World War II? In 1967, well within
the timeframe of Obama’s sweeping historical claim, King
identified the U.S. as “the leading purveyor of violence in
the world today.” The Vietnamese, King said, “must see
Americans as strange liberators” as they “languish under our
bombs….as we he herd them off the land of their fathers into
concentration camps. They know they must move or be
destroyed by bombs. They watch as we poison their water, as
we kill a million acres of their crops [with chemical
weapons]. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through
their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They
wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties
from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury.
So far we may have killed a million of them – mostly
children…” [9]
Looking at the historical literature on the
Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequent moment of supreme
nuclear danger, a living King (who would be 84 today had he
not been assassinated or perhaps executed inside “the anchor
of global security” exactly one year to the day after
publicly declaring his opposition to the Vietnam War at the
Riverside Church in New York City) today might also like to
mention (among other things) the remarkable degree to which
the Ahabs of Washington have been willing to risk global
thermonuclear war (very barely averted in October 1962) in
their quest for unchallenged global supremacy.[10]
“It Never Happened”
But in the U.S, and indeed across much of the
West, the record of ongoing, mass-murderous American
criminality is airbrushed out of the official history and
mass culture. It is tossed down Orwell's memory hole,
consistent with Big Brother's dictum in Nineteen Eighty
Four: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who
controls the present controls the past." As Harold Pinter
noted in his biting acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in
Literature, the reigning Western cultural authorities behave
as if U.S. crimes simply did not occur. When it comes to
America's transgression against civilized norms and
international law, "nothing ever happened. Even while it was
happening," Pinter added, "it never happened. It didn't
matter. It was of no interest.”[11] Dominant U.S.-led
Western cultural codes mandate that the only victims
meriting acknowledgement and compassion are those assaulted
by officially designated enemies. The larger number
victimized by the U.S. and its clients and allies (e.g., the
Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation and
apartheid) do not qualify for sympathy or even existence.
They don't exist. The crimes against them didn’t take place.
Detour and Lost Cool
Eleven minutes into his war speech, Obama had
to strangely shift gears and acknowledge the need to delay
his hoped-for war vote in light of Russia and Syria’s
last-minute proposal to demolish Syria’s chemical weapons
under international supervision and control. He tried to
save militaristic face by attributing the Russian and Syrian
move to his threatened use of force. He seemed to expect his
listeners to preposterously believe that a peaceful,
diplomatic, and international solution is his idea. Obama
wants us to think that the United Nations route was his
preferred path all along.
That’s nonsense. Obama is an aggressive
commander of a rogue military state that prefers force and
unilateral action in the names of unimpeded hegemony and
“American exceptionalism.” He and many of his fellow
fake-humanitarian cruise missile liberal imperialists have
been itching for a bigger war in the Middle East, one that
will let him attack the great regional enemy Iran and wrap
the remainder of his lame-duck presidency in the splendor of
war-fed patriotism.
Like the British Parliament’s vote against
attacking Syria, Putin and Assad’s peace gambit is a great
humiliation for Obama. It knocked more stuffing out of his
failing fake-humanitarian effort to rally a reluctant,
war-weary citizenry plagued by massive domestic problems
(including remarkably durable “homeland” poverty and
unemployment alongside stunning, New Gilded Age levels of
inequality that have only increased under Obama’s supposedly
progressive presidency) behind another expensive imperial
campaign.
Expect the defeated president to do his best
to get the nation back on a unilateral war footing. For now,
he has been defeated not simply by other politicians but
also by public opinion – by the citizenry in whose name he
claims to speak. Imagine that. Along the way, Barack “The
Empire’s New Clothes” Obama may well have lost his public
cool, the swagger in his step, once and for all. Syria may
prove his undoing –the moment when the outwardly nice and
smooth-talking “leader” is most clearly revealed for what he
really is: a cold-blooded sociopath and pathological liar.
That’s long overdue, but its better late than never.
Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com)
is the author of many books, including The Empire’s New
Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010),
Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008),
Crashing the Tea Party (2011), and They Rule: The 1% v.
Democracy (Paradigm Publishers, forthcoming in January
2014).
Selected Notes
1.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/10/remarks-president-address-nation-syria;
http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2013/09/10/president-obama-addresses-nation-syria
2.
Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah, "Civilian Deaths Imperil
Support for Afghan War," New York Times, May 6, 2009.
3.
Gall and Shah, “Civilian Deaths;”
4.
Paul Street, “Niebuhr Lives, Civilians Die in the Age of
Obama,” ZNet (June 15, 2009), read at
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21701.
By
contrast around the same time in 2009, there was a brief
media frenzy over a very different occurrence, enough to
elicit a full apology and to fire a White House official.
The problem was that the White House had scared New Yorkers
with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-soot flyover of
Manhattan that reminded people below of 9/11. See
Christina Boyle,
"President Obama Calls Air Force One Flyover ‘Mistake' After
Low-Flying Plane Terrifies New York," New York Daily News,
April 28, 2009; Michel Muskai, "Presidential Plane's
Photo-Op Over New York Coast as Much as $357,000," Los
Angeles Times, May 9, 2009; Peter Nicholas, "Louis
Caldera Resigns Over Air Force One Flyover Fiasco," Los
Angeles Time, May 9, 2009.
5.
Vladimir Putin, A Plea for Caution From Russia,” New York
Times, September 12, 2013.
5A. Patrick Cockburn, “Toxic Legacy of U.S. Assault on
Fallujah ‘Worse Than Hiroshima,” The Independent,
July 24, 2010,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html;
“Fallujah More Radioactive Than Hiroshima,” RT, uploaded on
July 29, 2010,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWIy9-cfMIo. A useful
history of U.S. use and encouragement of chemical and
biological weapons at home and abroad can be found in
William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only
Superpower (Monroe. ME: Common Courage, 2005), 136-160.
6.
Glen Ford, “Obama’s Humiliating Defeat,” Black Agenda
Report (September 11, 2013),
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-humiliating-defeat
7.
Blum, Rogue State, 1-2.
Honduras and Libya must (at the very least) be added to the
list of countries where the U.S. has acted to overthrow
governments since Blum wrote. Libya and Somalia must (at the
least) added to the list of countries bombed by the U.S.
8
Noam Chomsky, “Instead of Illegal Threat to Syria, U.S.
Should Back Chemical Weapons Ban in All Nations,” Democracy
Now! (September 11, 2013),
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/11/chomsky_instead_of_illegal_threat_to
9.
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam – a Time to
Break the Silence” (Riverside Church, New York City, April
4, 1967), audio recording at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k29PAUSyrlA
10. Noam Chomsky, Address to Left Forum, New York City,
2013,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yvHMtgac0Q
11.Quoted in John Pilger,
Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire
(New York: Nation Books, 2007), 4.
Via
Z Net
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